The Rosette Nebula is a huge emission nebula in the Orion arm of the galaxy located in the constellation of Monoceros. It is about 5500 light years away and about 150 light years across and stars are being born from the hydrogen that comprises the nebula.
Imaged with Takahashi FSQ85 at native focal length with my Moravian Instruments G2-8300 cooled CCD camera and Astrodon RGBHa filters. Data collected from my backyard observatory on 8th January 2018.
Image data is as follows (Ha is 1×1 and RGB is 2×2)
Ha > 14 x 1200s ; Red > 17 x 300s ; Green 12 x 300s ; Blue > 20 x 300s
As can be seen above, the Ha image is extremely detailed and shows a huge amount of detail. This is 3.5 hours of exposures through the Astrodon 3nm Ha filter.
Above is the RGB only image which is binned 2×2. It is a good picture in its own right but it is a bit flat and lacks the pizazz and sparkle of the Ha image. It is the combination of the Ha and the RGB that creates the colourful and detailed main image at the top. There are many ways this combination can be achieved. Here, I did it all in PixInsight whereas on some other pictures I used PI and Photoshop. What I did here was when in the linear state used the emission line script to add the Ha data to the red part of the image. Then after stretching the images I used the NBRGB script to combine the images in the linear state.
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