Reflection and emission in the eye of the seagull

This was a pretty fun image to process from the telescope live archives! Even though there wasn’t much data, with a lot of denoising I think most of the detail came through quite nicely. I’ve been honing a technique where I can process emission and reflection areas separately so that I can enhance reflection nebulae, and I think it turned out pretty well in this image! It isn’t by any means scientific, but it works to make pretty pictures.

IC 2177 is a region of nebulosity that lies along the border between the constellations Monoceros and Canis Major. It is a roughly circular H II region centered on the Be star HD 53367. The name Seagull Nebula is sometimes applied by amateur astronomers to this emission region, although it more properly includes the neighboring regions of star clusters, dust clouds and reflection nebulae.

Image:

Full quality image here: https://live.staticflickr.com/65535/52948943895_9bacc97393_o.png

Details:

Telescope: Planewave CDK24
Camera: FLI PL 9000
Filters: Halpha, SII, OIII,
Location: El Sauce Observatory, Río Hurtado, Coquimbo Region, Chile
Date of Observations: 3/12/2022, 4/10/2021, 1/6/2022 
L: 6 x 600s (1h)
R: 6 x 600s (1h)
G: 6 x 600s (1h)
B: 6 x 600s (1h)
Processing: Pixinsight
Credits: Data: Telescope Live; Processing: William Ostling

Processing:

Creation of Integrated Master Frames:
- Images were cosmetic corrected for hot pixels
- The subframes were weighted, registered, and normalized integrated
in WBPP
- The channels were manually integrated and drizzled
Preparation of master frames:
- Stacking artifacts were cropped
- RGB channels were combined to create an RGB image
- RGB image was plate solved
- Starless DBE was applied to L, RGB as follows:
      - Starnet 2 was applied to a clone of the target image, creating an image with stars and an image without stars
      - DBE was applied on the starless image to create a background model
      - The background model was subtracted from the stars image

Deconvolution of the L, RGB
- a PSF was created using the dynamic PSF process
- Linear starnet was applied to create a starless image and a star mask
- the linear image was duplicated, stretched, clipped, and convoluted to create a mask
- The starless image was deconvoluted using the RVC algorithm
- the stars were added back in
- DeepSNR noise reduction was applied to RGB
 and L
- A starless and stars version was created using starnet2
Non-linear Adjustments
- HT stretch
- LRGB combination
- Extract HA from broadband
- Enhance reflection nebula
- Recombination
- HDR
- LHE
- Curves transformation
- Star addition + reduction