Western Veil HaRGB experiment

[Carole]

I did some Ha on this object the other night and was intending to add Oiii and Sii as well, but been having some guiding problems - some nights it works just fine and other nights even without moving the kit or changing anything it will produce egg shaped stars.  Sometimes during the same run of images some subs will be egg shaped and some perfectly round, so no idea what is going on, guide graph is pretty flat.  Checked cables etc.  So until I get this sorted out I thought I'd add what I had to some old RGB data I had from 2011 with DSLR.  

Had to perform some processing techniques to this to get the stars sorted especially as I didn't have the spacing right on the DSLR image 2 years ago and the corner stars were shaped like daggers.  I used a Starizona tutorial to combine the two images, so it's really HaR RGB.

Did not add flats to the Ha image (although I have done some) as was just messing around with this and did a radial gradient to compensate.  I will use the flats if and when I finally get a narrowband image.

900 x 14 Ha Atik383L (3hours 40mins) July 2013 Skywatcher 200PDS NEQ6
RGB 2-7-2011 Rother Valley 18 x 5mins 800 iso Modified Canon 450D ED120
Software: Registar, DSS and photoshop CS3

Some of the stars don't bear close scrutiny due to the DSLR spacing, so I won't post up a larger image, but it's all good processing practice.  

[Rocket Pooch]

What you need is new kit to make it look better.

[Mike]

Very nice Carole. Nice and sharp and loads of detail. But again the colour balance is off. Lots of pink stars. Have you tried colour combining in different software to compare?

[Carole]

Thanks Mike,

I think it's my lack of experience in combining images this way and a step in the process I keep missing out.  Also perhaps not spotting these things myself, but I think I was more concerned with other problems at the time.  

Considering I had such awful data to start with = Ha egg shaped stars and DSLR noise + Bxxxxxxx awful corners.  I managed to make something fairly reasonable out of the crap, you should see the earlier version.   

I'll try to remember the background stars next time.  Not going to do any more to this as I am hoping to finish the narrowband version - fingers crossed.  

Carole