Playing with Pacman

This is the Pacman Nebula rendered using the Hubble palette where sulfur, hydrogen and oxygen are color mapped to red, green and blue. The challenge is to find a pleasing color palette that also shows good color separation between the different gases.

The Pacman Nebula NGC 281 rendered in the Hubble color palette

The sequence I ran last night included sets of Sii, Ha and Oiii at 600s and R,G&B at 120s. They were all aligned and stacked in DSS using one of the Ha frames as the reference frame. The three narrowband sets were then stretched using an arcsine algorithm in FITS Liberator, loaded into Photoshop for color mapping and tweaking. The RGB autosave.tif files were loaded into Photoshop and stretched and adjusted primarily for star color. I then used StarXTerminator to remove the stars from the narrowband image and added the stars from the RGB combination for the final image.

PlaneWave CDK12.5, Paramount MX+, ASI6200MM

9 to 10 frames each of Sii, Ha and Oiii at 600s each for a total of about 4.5 hours

4 each of red, green and blue at 120s each for the stars

Stacked in DSS, processed in Photoshop, finished in Lightroom