North America Nebula - Borg 77ED-II f4.3 & SXVR-694

After my Ha effort on the North America Nebula rather than a mosaic with the Pelican I thought I'd try colour. My history with colour images is a frustrating one but I figured I've got to give it a go. 

As anyone who images in narrowband will know there is never enough SII in there and you'll see below that I've kind of cut short on the SII relative to the OII but this object is descending fast in the west now and there's so many other objects to tackle! 

This is the closest I've got to the 'classic' HST look in an image and it's involved so much fiddling (PixInsight lacks the Selective Colour tool that PS has) that I think I kind of lost track of what I was doing but, it is the North American Nebula and there is colour there so I'm happy...

Details:

OTA:  Borg 77EDII at f/4.3
Camera:  Starlight Xpress SXVR-694
Mount:  Skywatcher NEQ6 Pro controlled via EQMac
Guiding:  Starlight Xpress Lodestar on a piggybacked Borg MiniBorg Guidescope with PHD
Captured by:  Nebulosity
Processed in:  PixInsight (all on Mac OS X)

28x  10 min Ha (mapped to Green)
60x  10 min OII (mapped to Blue)
36x  10 min SII  (mapped to Red)
 

As always comments/criticism welcome. I'm using a marginally calibrated monitor so if the colours are way out of whack then apologies for any headaches caused :-)

James

 

Click to enlarge (2.5mb)