My last go at this nebula was back in late 2019, and I think I've gotten a little better since then (equipment is the same across both photos). The nebula in this pic is false color (SHO/Hubble palette), but the stars are true color RGB. Captured over a bunch of nights from January-April 2025, from a bortle 9 zone.

Places where I host my other images:

Flickr | Pixelfed

Equipment:

• TPO 6" F/4 Imaging Newtonian

• Orion Sirius EQ-G

• ZWO ASI1600MM-Pro

• Skywatcher Quattro Coma Corrector

• ZWO EFW 8x1.25"/31mm

• Astronomik LRGB+CLS Filters- 31mm

• Astrodon 31mm Ha 5nm, Oiii 3nm, Sii 5nm

• Agena 50mm Deluxe Straight-Through Guide Scope

• ZWO ASI-290mc for guiding

• Moonlite Autofocuser

Acquisition: 70 hours 5 minutes (Camera at -15°C), unity gain

• Ha - 123x600"

• Oiii - 147x600"

• Sii - 135x600"

• R - 53x60"

• G - 51x60"

• B - 51x60"

• Darks- 30

• Flats- 30 per filter

Capture Software:

• Captured using N.I.N.A. and PHD2 for guiding and dithering.

PixInsight Preprocessing:

• BatchPreProcessing

• StarAlignment

• Blink

• ImageIntegration per channel

• DrizzleIntegration (2x, Var β=1.5)

• Dynamic Crop

• DynamicBackgroundExtraction

  duplicated each image and removed stars via StarXterminator. Ran DBE with a shitload of points to generate background model. model subtracted from original pic using the following PixelMath (math courtesy of /u/jimmythechicken1)

  $T * med(model) / model

Narrowband Linear:

• Blur and NoiseXTerminator

• StarXterminator to completely remove stars from each the image

• HistogramTransformation to stretch Ha and Sii images to nonlinear

Broadband/RGB linear:

• ChannelCombination to make color image from R G and B stacks

• SpectrophotometricColorCalibration

• HSV repair to fix blown out star cores

• StarX (correct only)

• StarX to make a stars only image

• ArcsinhStretch + Histogramtransformation to stretch nonlinear (Calling this the Stars image now)

• SCNR > Invert > SCNR (50%) > Invert to remove greens and some magentas from stars

• Slight saturation boost

Nonlinear:

• ChannelCombination to combine stretched narrowband images into color image (SHO --> RGB)

• Shitloads of curve transformations to adjust lightness, contrast, saturation, color balance, etc

• LRGBCombination with stretched Ha as luminance

• ColorSaturation

• NoiseXterminator

• LocalHistogramEqualization

• Clone stamp to remove a couple highly saturated star spots that starx didn't remove (they looked incredibly out of place)

• Pixelmath to add in the stretched RGB Stars image from earlier

  This basically re-linearizes the two images, adds them together, and then stretches them back to before. More info on it here)

  mtf(.005,

  mtf(.995,Stars)+

  mtf(.995,Starless))

• DynamicCrop again

• Resample to 60%

• Annotation