IC 1274/1275/4684/4685, NGC 6559 – Nebulae in Sagittarius – SHO w/RGB Stars v1
An assortment of nebulae in Sagittarius, very close to the well-photographed Lagoon, thus sort of completing the Lagoon footprint, which made me come up with this nickname.
This is a narrowband (SII, H-alpha, OIII) plus RGB image. For rendering the NB data, I used the “Foraxx” palette described in The Coldest Nights blog along with other techniques. Worked rather well, a pure SHO approach would yield a very green image. Stars are color-calibrated RGB.
Emission and reflection nebulae in this field: IC 1274/1275/4684/4685, NGC 6559
Time-lapse photography Copyright (C) 2023-2025 Martin Junius Music “Sequenced Variations 1” Copyright (C) 2025 Martin Junius (Home-made in my studio, hopefully avoiding Youtube Content-ID hell)
NGC 5139 – Omega Centauri Globular Cluster – OSC v1
And one more. ;-) Of course, Omega Centauri aka NGC 5139 is a jewel in the southern sky and a go-to-target. So Omega Centauri’s photons were the “first light” for the ASI 2600 MC Duo on the AK3 astrograph, but I messed up focussing and had to redo it later.
All three globular clusters here in the blog were processed in PixInsight and Lightroom with the same color calibration and processing steps. Interestingly enough, their appearance varies quite a bit!
Messier 62 – Flickering Globular Cluster in Ophiuchus – OSC v2
Another globular cluster, only about 9 degrees from M4 towards the constellation Ophiuchus, Messier 62 or NGC 6266 against the dense background star field of the Milky Way.
Notable change to my previously shown OSC workflow: I used “K2V star” as the white reference for SpectrophotometricColorCalibration. Standard “Average spiral galaxy” yielded stars, which were too “golden” for my taste, thus this bluer/colder rendition.
This blog post is a quick overview of the processing in PixInsight (PI) for my CG 8 and 9 image. Quite some 3rd party add-ons for PI were used. If time permits I’ll add links to the various tools.
One more step on the long way to complete the CG catalog here. Most of the CGs are in Puppis, which meanwhile sets quite early in the southern hemisphere night.