As an astrophotographer you’d think I like stars – and I do. But what I really find appealing are the nebulae the hide among the stars. Sometimes there are so many stars that they start to conceal the beauty of the gas and dust. My normal worfflow is to remove the stars and so I can process the stars and nebula independently. In this case I just decided to leave the stars out and really let the nebula shine.
This is also a somewhat unusual color palette. The three most common narrowband filters are hydrogen (Ha), oxygen (Oiii) and sulfur (Sii). A basic color image is made up of three colors; red, green and blue. We’re free to assign the three different gases to the three colors however we see fit but the most common are HOO, HSO and SHO (the order of the three letters correspond to red, green and blue).
When I process my images I usually explore a variety of color palettes and in this case the OHS palette just seemed to fit. It created a nice color contrast with predominantly cool tones and just a little red for an accent.