The Veil Nebula in color (Ha, OIII and OSC)

Veil Nebula

Other names:NGC6979
Distance:1470 light years
Date:22-Jul-2019, 23-Jul-2019, 25-Jul-2019
Lens:Asahi Pentax Super Multi Coated Takumar 200mm f/4
Field of view:6° 14' x 4° 10'
Cameras:Canon T3i mono mod, Canon 600D
Filters:Baader 7nm Ha, Baader 8nm OIII, none/OSC
Mount:Skywatcher EQ6-R
Guiding:TSL50D, Lacerta MGEN-II
Exposure time:9h 9min
Ha 30 x 7min
OIII27 x 7min
OSC 150 x 1min
Sizes 1920 x 1080 | 5100 x 3342
optional processingHOO without color
The first project including OSC data taken with the vintage Takumar. It does not perform as well as I was hoping. The red channel is out of focus and the stars have strong color fringes. Splitting the image into channels and morphologically shrinking the red one solved the problem. It took me full four attempts or almost two days until I was satisfied with the combination of the color and the narrowband data. No other project before has cause so much processing effort, which is not only from my four retries in post processing but from the preprocessing of 150 subs. The goal was to create an image that is somehow natural in color, that is mapping the narrowband data to the true colors and process the stars colorful. Of course the image is not very natural when looking at the intensities but this is often the case in astro imaging.