vdB142 / IC1396A in [SII], Halpha and [OIII]

by Richard Crisp

But I like it and the reason is that it brings clear nights and very steady seeing.

I have been amazed at the seeing conditions I have been experiencing night after night after night. Focus shots at sundown that are in the 2.5 arc-sec range and improvement as it gets later in the night.

I think we are at the end of this heat wave and last night included late night (2am ish) fog rolling in. It was damp outside this morning when I left for work.

I have been really enjoying the use of the Stinger 450mm classical cassegrain. The conditions are wonderful for use at 3366mm focal length. I just can't get enough of this but alas all good things must come to an end.

I would like to take another 5-8 frames of [OIII] and a similar number of extra [SII] frames but I am wondering if that will be possible any time soon.

So I am going to release this now, at 11 hours total exposure over four nights and if I can add more to it later then I will.

Now before you guys all puke over the image about it being noisy, let me say that is intentional. I absolutely believe you cannot do in Photoshop what you failed to do in the field: ie get enough data for a smooth image. What so many do, and I strenuously object to, is overly smooth the data to eliminate the grain and then have to resort to oversharpening to recover the lost detail

Trouble is that seldom really works. Once the detail is lost it is lost. And the oversharpening I see so much of tends to darken the darker parts of the nebula and causes loss of fine detail in the darker parts.

I realize I am in the minority on this, as most folks seem to follow the lead of a small group that has gone down this oversmooth, oversharpen path.

But being in the minority and doing my own thing is not something that bothers me in the least as anyone that really knows me will attest.

So here's that image:

http://www.narrowbandimaging.com/vdb142_mk1sn2_cm10_geg_cs_s2hao3_page.htm

The tight double in the "body" toward the lower left was very cleanly split: you could drive a truck between them before the processing. As the curves are pushed and so on the stars usually get fatter. I could edit them but that violates my "processing ethics"