Pelican Nebula

10 August 2022

I came home from vacation and the weather forecast promised some clear nights but also a quite bright moon. Thanks to my new duo narrowband filter this is a manageable problem and I opted to shoot some narrowband data and planned to add the image of a short broadband session just for nice star colors. The final image is composed of two nights of narrowband data and one (short) night for broadband data.

Editing the narrowband data was quite different this time as I didn't get a good separation between the blue and red hues. To get around this problem I made some quite aggressive curve transformations to get a good separation between the colors. Splitting this image to its color channels and some pixel math lead to quite usable masks which I used in turn to do the final color adjustment and separation.