NGC281 The Pacman Nebula - posted 11/11/06

Well it was November before I finally got around to processing the data for this image, taken in early August! I had taken a whopping 6 hours of HA data on this subject, along with some green and blue. I usually take some straight (clear) luminance to make blending the HA easier but didn't this time. Having some LUM to blend in really helps to get the star colors right. As an alternative, I created a temporary RGB image using 1 hour of HA, with the green and blue. I then created a synthetic luminance from the resulting RGB image and I blended this with the full 6 hours of HA to create the final Luminance channel. Having all that HA data allowed me to really push the sharpening on that luminance channel and I'm pretty happy with the end result.