One of the projects that Maurizio wanted to complete for a long time and of course the vision of this iconic nebula always attracted us since the beginning. Our first image of the Horsehead Nebula was taken during a star party in Sept. 2019 of only 3 minutes but late last year and early this year taking advantage of the benevolence of an unusual winter and clear skies, Maurizio was able to achieve several sessions in our backyard as in Bortle 4 skies that helped a lot in getting a better capture of this beautiful and fascinating nebula.
We used the L-Pro stack for do a base of stars, but this time I put together the stars obtained in a session with the Triad Ultra filter where they came out particularly beautiful and with excellent colors. Stacked both programs DSS and Siril on normal and 2 drizz the sessions done with Extreme and Triad Ultra filter together. Additionally, the extraction of Ha and [OIII] was carried out.
One of the stacks was applied part of the tools offered by Siril: Photometric color calibration, background extraction and Histogram Transformation manually. Level, arcsinh curve, noise gradient, S curve were applied to the other, and both were finished working in CamRaw. The noise reduction part was came aout nicely, and in both it was applied Noise Exterminator with a mixture of Denoise. The details were achieved using also the Ps unsharp mask tool.
Ha and [OIII] were also worked on to achieve a luminance base with details in which it was assembled by mixing Ha 65% and [OIII] 35%.
Acquisition Dates:
Dec. 7, 2021 · Dec. 13, 2021 · Dec. 30, 2021 · Jan. 1, 2022 · Jan. 6, 2022 · Jan. 21, 2022 · Jan. 30, 2022 · Feb. 2, 2022 · Feb. 5, 2022
Filters:
Optolong L-Pro 2″
Optolong L-eXtreme 2″
Radian Triad Ultra 2″
Integration: 23h 31′ 30″ 293 frames
Programs for acquisition: PH2, Astro Photography Tool (APT)
Programs for process: Deep Sky Stacker, Siril and Photoshop.
Acquisition and Process Maurizio Camerin and Nicla Camerin