Heart Nebula in SHO

Exposure time - 4.5 Hours (2h Exposure time - 4.5 Hours (2h Ha, 1.5 Oiii, 1h Sii)
Exposure Length - 3 Minutes at Unity Gain (G139, O21)
Scope - Skywatcher 200PDS
Camera - ZWO ASI1600MM Pro
August and September 2019Ha, 1.5 Oiii, 1h Sii)

Exposure Length - 3 Minutes at Unity Gain (G139, O21)

Scope - Skywatcher 200PDS

Camera - ZWO ASI1600MM Pro

The Heart Nebula resides very close to the W of cassiopeia alongside the Soul Nebula and Iconic Double Cluster. Throughout fall, it can be found rising higher in the eastern skies which provides an ideal time to get hours worth of exposure..

Unfortunately for me, the weather does not like to cooperate, so it took 2 nights over the space of 2 months to collect only 4.5 hours worth of data. Because of this, processing the data was a challenge and mostly consisted of noise reduction, with a side of even more noise reduction. 

When you map a sho image, you often get a washed out green mess. This may look bad, but it can be very useful to create nice looking colours. I find using the Selective colour tool in photoshop to strip back the green cast works very well, turning them into a gold and shades of cyan. To remove the Purple halos often found in the original combine, I learnt that inverting the image than removing all of the greens, then inverting the image again can help remove them completely.

Captured using SGPro and PHD2