M78 Casper the Friendly Ghost Nebula embedded within Ghostly Ha

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Often overlooked this time of year with the big focus on objects like the horsehead or orion nebula, just off the side of Orion is the Casper the Friendly Ghost nebula M78. A very bright pair of reflection nebulae with dark secrets hidden behind dust lanes. Curious about that I took a decent amount of dedicated Ha data and continuum subtracted it from the red channel. The amount of Ha filling and swirling around the whole image was breathtaking! Also in Ha hidden structures in the dark dust lanes peaked through revealing dozens of Herbig-Haro and Young Stellar Objects! I made two seperate collages showcasing them.



I absolutely struggled on how to merge the Ha with the RGB. There was just sooo much Ha swirling and filling the image it was a balancing act to not wash out the beautiful RGB. In the end I decided to showcase the RGB as the main image with the HaRGB as the mouseover. Please let me know in the comments if you prefer either HaRGB over the standard RGB image and I will gladly swap them.

[chridignan]

Fabulous - and so much to learn from the objects within. Thank you.

[franks]

Amazing image. I like the version with the frequency separation. That swirl is very cool.

[ajmxr]

I like how you did it. When you present just the LRGB first it seems way less busy and lets you orient yourself first

[AntonioPena]

Great way to close the year, this shows your great job, and infer what is your scope mm size, I love the option 2 more, contraste great with the HA Red, also love the HA Arrow region, good job!

[Aerostar]

Boy, you sure have had some good weather to get all that data.

[gabewrsewell]

i appreciate the rundowns like these of your images, they’re very helpful. I like the full implementation of the hydrogen data, it does well to hide the bit of colour mottle we get from those very low signal areas in RGB. I had my first light finally with my own 10” iOptron newtonian, but i was dealing with some very significant collimation shift over the course of a few minutes once i set it running, i must be doing something wrong in my collimation but it’s so cold that it’s a real PITA to get the bugs worked out! I also got first light on my 75mm f/0.89 EAA rig, plenty of optical issues to be worked on there of course.
I was hoping you’d show the continuum subtraction, i agree this was a really clean one too! i like the broad, feathery textured hydrogen emission that seems to be throughout the orion region.

[AstroCapture]

Very nice as always. I prefer the RGB as the main image. I know you tried a bunch of permutations, did you look at dialing back the Ha when you performed image blend?

[j.s.]

Can you elaborate on your "masked screen" process you used to add Ha to your LRGB?

Seems like something very useful.

[SDOC-xpod]

You mention trying a frequency separation technique before blending the images, is this using either HDRMT, or Multi-scale linear transform? I know you've done tutorials before, but a brief workflow tutorial for this challenging image would be great!

[meibergstrmandersen]

Thank you Frank, a lot of learning to pick-up for a novice like me. ✌ And nice to see the Ha trick on Astrobin. Which Bortle level are you shooting at with the 10" iOptron ?

[kevinivey]

I do have a suggestion. As you noted, you were having some struggles with blending your images in a satisfactory way. I would suggest, and I think it would also be an interesting video if you collaborated with Craig over at Utah Desert Observatory. I know that he likes and watches your work. He very well may be happy to assist.

[KJRitch]

Another Wow! How many nights did it take to obtain 36 hours of data? You must have had a run of clear nights? Do you use dark flats vs bias frames for calibration? What is the exposure of your flats with the 294 camera? How many 15 minute exposure did you have to throw out due to guiding error? When using mono LRGB, is luminance always shot with longer exposures vs the color filters? Do you have to worry about salt in the air at your location? I only have a OSC camera. Would I need a duo band filter to get some decent results? It would be interesting to see how you would process this data in something like Siril. Thanks.

[goldfishful]

What scope did you use for this?

Nevermind, I saw on your astrobin page.

[jesuschrist]

Looks like a quasar and jet. Im sure its not though :(