IC 4601

IC 4601 is a beautiful reflection nebula usually imaged in widefield images of the Blue Horsehead but worthy of attention on its own

 

Imaged from Bortle 6 so bringing out the dust after gradient removal was challenging.

 

 

Equipment

 

Redcat 651/AM3/ZWOASI533MC/Antlia Triband Filter/ASIAIR

4 hours of integration, 5 minute subs

 

Processing

stacked in AstroPixelProcessor, processed in PixInsight

 

Processing Notes

 

Stack

Dynamic Crop

Tried three tools for Gradient Removal

-Auto DBE

-GraXpert

GradientCorrection

 

Gradient Correction did the best job IMHO

 

Blur X -correction

Image Solver

SPCC

Starnet++

 

Nebula

BlurX

GHS

Curves Transformation

 

Stars

 

SetiAstro star stretch script

 

stars and nebula combined with Pixelmath

 

Minor tweaking in Photoshop CS6

 

Done