Sweetman Astrophotography

My second major deepspace target for the month of October was the Heart Nebula. I shot this with the Optolong L-eNhance dual narrowband filter, approximately 200 5 minute subs over the course of 2 nights. As I always do after a completed night of shooting I do a quick stack, background extraction, and stretch just to see where I’m at. The result is below.

I was confident I was on the right track and went into the second night of shooting. I repeated the process. I was mostly wondering if I should shoot a 3rd night or wether I was at a good stopping point.

I was pretty disappointed with what I saw, the image was getting saturated if I tried to stretch to the point where I could see some of the finer details. I though that the first night actually had better details. I tried a few different ways, used some different methods of background extraction, but nothing improved the result….nothing that is until I tried doing an independent channel stretch. Basically, the red channel was not in need of much adjustment, while the other colors had a lot signal hiding in the noise, but needed some stretching to get it out.

A final note, I usually prefer well populated star fields to starless images, but I’m not sure I do on this one. I’ll put the final starless image below, I think I may actually prefer it to the one with the stars.