IC405 Flame Nebula - Season Finale

[Astrobdlbug]

Evening all,  I am impressed with all the galaxies that are being posted, but  during the recent run of clear(ish) nights I went my own way with an end of season nebula target.

I have been imaging the Flame nebula in 3nm narrowband as it heads west and sinks into the grimy muck of the distribution warehouse light bubble that is my westward view.
This LP is why in general I avoid image targets that are low and in the west.  Which in hindsight begs the question why did I choose this imaging project last week.....

 

Anyway, the positives, using 3nm Ha really cuts through the murk and I got a good 8.5hrs of Ha and solid 6hrs of Sii. I tried to image Oiii but despite pulling down 7hrs, there was nothing of use in the Oiii integration and the gradient was horrendous, even 3nm is no defence against bright LP and lots of high humidity atmosphere..

My processing solution was to include addtional data from my Auriga widefield from a few weeks ago and also last year.
Overall there is contribution from approximately 25hrs of imaging based on ASI1600MM and 3nm Antlia filters through AT106EDT with 0.75x reducer and Samyang 135mm Lens.

 

Due to the variety images and integrations used for this image I processed it mainly in PS as I can blend the different channels and images using layers and masks. I did use PI and the new Generalised Hyberbolic Stretch utility to stretch the new Ha and Sii integrations. I used a small amount of Topaz denoise, about 4 in the low light option and used the APF-R utility in Photoshop to sharpen the image under a mask.

 

The full frame (with slight edge crop for stacking artifacts) and a crop of the Flame are below,

 

thanks for looking

Bryan

 

 

 

[paul]

Deep and detailed, lovely👍

[Padraic M]

Very nice Bryan, I love the colouring but it must have been a nightmare to process in PS!

[Astrobdlbug]

4 hours ago, Padraic M said:

it must have been a nightmare to process in PS!

 

Thanks for your positive  comments @paul & @Padraic M and everone who has liked my image, its very much appreciated.

 

To address the processing  - Processing is probably my favorite part of the entire astro imaging flow, I just love working with such advanced tools that can manipuate MegaPixel scale images.
PS was my first processing tool so over the past 7-8 years I have built up a reasonable understanding of how to use PS and also added many useful plugins - its only relatively recently, probably around 2020 when I started narrowband that I started using Pixinsight for more of the processing flow.  Without starting a PS V PI discussion I will say that each tool brings a lot to the table but the user interfaces are very different but I have got used to swapping between each tool depending on how an image process progresses and use the most appropriate tool, either PI or PS,  I think needs to be applied to get the most from the data.
I use Astro Pixel Process to stack my subs and have been using the 'Remove Light Polution' tool in that package more than DBE as it delivers very impressive results.

I do still tweak with DBE in PI and use the eZ-suite for Deconvolution and  depending on the integration quality also use EzDenoise.
I am using GHS (Generalised Hyperbolic Stretch) utilty in PI to stretch my images recently as it gives unprecedented control of such an important step in the process flow.

 

The last but very important factor, at least IMHO, is th e PC I run everything on - I built a rediculously high end beast last year, 4.2Ghz Ryzen with 6 CPU cores, stuffed with 32Gb memory and 1Tb M.2 SSD that sits on PCIe 4.0 bus so its faster than a fast thing going fast 🙂

It also has a reasonably high performance Nvidia GPU card, RTX3060, which with a bit of setup allows certain tools to really use the GPU to process images, Topaz and Starnet++ are the obvious ones.
 

I've probably gone into way to much detail given your comment but hopefully this is useful background in terms of the image I've posted up,

 

Bryan

[Padraic M]

4 hours ago, Astrobdlbug said:

I've probably gone into way to much detail given your comment but hopefully this is useful background in terms of the image I've posted up,

Thanks Bryan, actually very interesting! I'm just using APP and Gimp at the moment with very little additional processing being done, and I know that PI is in my future, I just have a few more pieces of hardware to complete my two imaging rigs before I invest.

I've also been thinking about building a processing PC. Now that I'm making progress with standardising my capture process, and I'm in a position to reuse data from previous sessions, I find that the laptop is taking hours to integrate multi-night stacks with different scopes and cameras. But I'm getting bogged down with matching motherboards to PSUs and CPUs, GPUs and memory modules etc. A more detailed writeup on your processing PC would be great!

[Astrobdlbug]

19 minutes ago, Padraic M said:

A more detailed writeup on your processing PC would be great!

I can post up the spec - possibly start a new thread over in software tools but before I do here is a picture as I went for whats referred to as hard line water cooling using acrylic tubing that I had to learn how to bend and lots of stuff that lights up all in a Lian-Li O11-Dynamic-mini glass sided case  - my inner geek just went overboard for all the tech that can be applied to a self build PC workstation. Obviously a decent astro image processing workstation can be built without going to this extreme....😁

 

 

[Padraic M]

Wow! I haven't used a water-cooled computer since an IBM mainframe in 1983. Used to provide hot water to the washbasins in a 9-storey office block. The first step in the power-up sequence was to lift a floor tile in the computer room and open the water inlet valve.

It didn't look half as cool as yours though!

[paul]

Pi benefits from lots of ram and an ssd for caching. The more Ram you have the less hard drive thrashing 😊. 

 

I have a PC similar to Bryan's in a Corsair X5000 case (the case and rgb bling bought with a loyalty bonus for 10yrs at my company!) but without an Nvidia card to turbo charge some of the calcs.