LDN1622 is always an interesting object to me. The most interesting part for me is the Parsamian 3 (HBC515, HD288313) area. Anyhow, it looks like a fish trying pretty hard swimming toward the Orion nebula and about to cross the red river of Barnard’s Loop…
It has been a year since the last HaLRGB image. It’s about time.
On and off I captured about 50+ hours of Ha data from the backyard (Guess I had nothing else in mind at that time. LOL). But only got 7.6 hours of RGB data from Atoka dark site. I assume the dark site data is far away from enough. But can’t resist the temptation to take a peek what it would look like. Then here it is.
As expected the dark cloud is not showing up enough. I consider this is a project in progress. More data will be added in next couple of years to get the “desired” result.
Lacking RGB data indeed push the post-processing to the limit. A lot of Range Selection + PixelMath combinations used to extract every single drop of the signal. The starless version of the RGB masters look exactly like heavily pounded battle ground – all kinds of holes. 🙂
The synthetic luminance master was created from the starless Ha master joined with the luminance data extracted from the combined RGB master. Another fun process to put the pre-main-sequence star area back into the final luminance master.
This image was picked by NASA Astronomy Photo Of the Day (APOD) on 2020/02/21 https://apod.nasa.gov/apod/ap200221.html; and was picked by AstroBin as the Image Of The Day on 2020/02/14.