With the recent great weather (I haven’t seen a cloud in weeks!), I was able to work on a deep rendition of the famous Elephant Trunk Nebula, aka vdB142.
This is a collaboration with my friend Samuel Díaz López, who collected the O[III] data.
With a GSO RC8 and a Moravian G2-1600, I collected 36x1800” Hα frames and 36x1800” S[II] frames. With a GSO RC10 and an Atik 4000, Samuel collected 30x1800” O[III] frames.
The grand total is 102x1800” frames, which is 51 hours.
The clarity of the signal and the resulting ease of processing, plus the depth of the image, which shows a lot of really faint wisps of matter, makes the time spent really worth it.
It took about three hours to process the data. As usual, I composited a “Modified Hubble Palette”, with the following properties:
Red: 50% Hα + 50% S[II] Green: 85% O[III] + 15% Hα Blue: O[III]
The stars were treated separately, with their color coming from a bicolor composition of the Hα and O[III] data.
The nebulosity was treated using Jukka Pekka Metsävainiö’s tone mapping technique, obviously adapted to PixInsight.