So I just performed a little more surgery right there on the mount, adjusting the spider knobs and then adding a little unbend with some vice grips. This displaced the secondary underneath the focuser, of course, but oh well, that's just a field illumination problem. I recollimated as-is, then with NGC 1333 off the table, thought about a good star for sharp spike testing.
Alnitak!
Seeing and guiding were poor, but I followed this one all the way down to 25° alt! Of course I took my RGB near meridian, then L, and lastly Ha. After culling bad subs, total integration 3.3 hours. 72m L, about 25m each RGB, and 55m Ha. Stacked in WBPP, composited as LRGB with NB Accent.
There's a lot of range here, and thus plenty of options for OptiDev. After a couple flops, I got one that I liked and that didn't throw off SVD with poor apod creation. I also kept in mind that I would later be filling much of the field with NB Accent, and thus trying to stretch out the Ha captured via LRGB was not a priority. SVD seemed to work well despite the short integration, and I only had one little star (Alnitak's close buddy) with ringing that needed deringing repair later using Shrink.
Likewise I adjusted the blue reduction bias in Color to permit a bit more (one mouse wheel click) blue at this stage, in anticipation of the reddening to come. This gave some more strength to the blue giant cores and blue reflection areas to hold off the effects of NB Accent.
That said, nebular NB Accent on this target is still overwhelming, particularly if using pure red. I again used the screen one stretch with that blending in mind, and also lowered second screen strength parameter to 66%. Which also helped preserve both some detail and some orange color in the Flame. Elsewise the Flame just completely blows out from the power of the Ha here, and sliders like brightness correlation were opposite of the way I think I needed it to work here.
Interestingly I had a line on the left side that at first I thought might be an unrejected satellite trail. Then I realized that the line is pointing directly to Alnilam, off screen! A bit fuzzy, but that's way out there from the originating star.
Who would think that Alnilam would trash my HorseHead shot, not Alnitak (which actually stretched out rather well, I think).
Overall, I'm happy with the sharper and straighter spikes, though they aren't perfect. Yet.
I'd say the target is worth capturing more time on, in order to get better and cleaner detail and more stretch on faint nebulosity, not to mention hopefully some better seeing.
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- IC434 LRGBHa test ST9 2C 1600-92.jpg (546.48 KiB) Viewed 2477 times
, i think they add value to the picture. It could perhaps use a bit more integration time just to reveal a bit the darker clouds under the horsehead.
Then by chance it was the CN target last month, but didn't participate. Just trying to catch up! But even if I can't catch the surrounding dust, the reflection and red colors of the main target are pretty neat, and the field has some great star colors.