The Owl nebula and the Surfboard galaxy

 I started the Owl and Surfboard at home before we left for KH. I used my SXVR694 and Altairastro 102m Wave refractor, reduced, to capture 12x300s luminance subs and 2x300s red ones. I lost the remaining colour channels to a rookie mistake to do we where the dome was pointing! Once at Kelling, I used my ASI533 osc camera with my Altairastro 70edt refractor to capture 18x300s RGB subs.

Processing was rather complicated. I stacked the luminance and 2x red channel subs with their bias and flat frames. Then I stacked the RGB osc images using drizzle to keep some resolution. All done in PI using the WBPP script.

Once the masters were ready, I used Graxpert to remove gradients, applied BlurX to them, resampled the RGB image to reduce it's size, star align to register and crop the Lum, Red and RGB images, separated the red, green and blue channels from the colour image the used pixelmath to incorporate the 2 red images into the red channel.

Then I followed my usual processing of starX and NoiseX on the non-linear images, boosted the saturation of the colour image, sharpened the luminance image and combined them. Stars were returned using the Screenstars script.

I'm quite please with the result, particularly as the original OSC image was captures with quite a small telescope.

Click on the image to get a closer view

The Owl and Surfboard

Anne Startup