Skull Nebula, NGC246, 3500 ly & NGC 255, 59 million ly, both in Cetus

As I started working on processing the pic of Skull nebula I just decided to go ahead and develop a RGB, HOO & SHO image. I thought it would be fun to see all 3 and because the image is small I knew I could combine them into a single image when I was done. It was fun to see the different problems I had developing each image. And, it is nice to see them in a single image.

Here’s an example of one problem I had. In the HOO & SHO images NGC255, the galaxy, does not come out correctly so I made a copy of my RGB image, removed all but the galaxy and then added the galaxy to my star image. The result is that in both the HOO & SHO images it shows the galaxy appropriately. It was a fun challenge to figure out.

Pics were taken between Oct 10 & 17.

Askar 120apo@840f7.5, 2600MM Pro g100. [4.75hrs total] R:20x300s G:18x300s B:19x300s
[7.5hrs total] Ha:38x300s O3:38x300s S2:14x300s+darks/biases/flats.
AM5/ASIair+, EAF, Askar OAG with ASI174mini for guiding

PixInsight, plus RC-Astro BXT, SXT, NXT, plus scripts by Cosmic Photons & Seti Astro

I guess I should say too I used Affinity to take the final 3 pics from PixInsight and combine them into one image.

Processing 3 separate images is way more work than you might think. Each one was developed differently. It doesn’t look like it from the output (meaning I did a reasonable job). Each one had separate problems that had to be dealt with differently.