[Entry submitted by Howard]
Hello:
I'd like to submit the following rendition of NGC6914 to the December contest (hope I'm not too late!). This image goes all the way back to the summer (not much going on for me since then!), and I posted it to the Gallery in September.
It is the result of 15 hours of exposure taken over many nights from July 24 to August 25. I used a PlaneWave CDK17 and an Apogee U16M camera equipped with Astrodon filters (including a 3-mn Ha), riding atop a Paramount ME, and guided by a Starlight Xpress Lodestar camera through an Astrodon MOAG. The exposures were: 200 minutes in luminance (unbinned); 170 mins in Ha (unbinned); and 130 mins red, 140 mins green, and 260 mins blue (all colours binned 2x2). All subframes were 10 minutes. Image capture was done with ACP controlling TheSkyX, MaxIm DL, and Focusmax.
Processing was done entirely with PixInsight (except for CCDInspector to get a preliminary assay of the quality of the subframes). In addition to image calibration and integration, the major processing algorithms used were HDRMultiscaleTransform, LocalHistogramEqualization, MultiscaleMedianTransform, MorphologicalTransformation (MT), and LRGBCombine. Also noteworthy was the use of Vicent Peris' method for adding Ha to the LRGB (with many thanks to Harry Page for his
explanation), and the use of MT with CurvesTransformation and UnsharpMask to reduce star sizes.
Good luck to all the submitters - the quality and variety this round is amazing!
Howard.
The image can also be accessed
here.
