The Jellyfish Nebula is the remains of a high-mass star that exploded as a supernova sometime between 3000 and 30,000 years ago.
Version 2, reprocessed December 2022
From the Reprocessing Bonanza 2022. This version uses exactly the same data as version 1, but with better processing tools and skills. This was incredibly hard to edit at the time, but a fair bit easier with new tools and skills. I like the colour palette in the original, and the glowing lilac shades in particular, but I’ve never been able to reproduce them! The original image looks terrible when viewed large or with any kind of zoom, however, so I tried to improve that while also keeping some nice colours in.
Version 1, January 2022
To say I had a tough time processing this would be a bit of an understatement! I made an initial version based on an integration time of 20 hours, and liked the unusual glowing colours I pulled out, but it was very noisy.
The following night was clear, so I collected more data, bringing my total to 24 hours. I then spent the best part of two days trying various processing methods on this version. I could produce final images that were technically better than my original attempt, but just didn’t grab me as much from an aesthetics perspective. In particular, I found it difficult to pull out different colours from the L-eXtreme data, and had to make extensive use of colour masks.
In the end I went back to the original, made a few tweaks, and declared it finished. I’ve still got the freshly integrated 24 hour version though, so may return to it in the future.
* January 2022
* Bristol, UK (Bortle 8)
* Telescope: Askar FRA400 f/5.6 Quintuplet APO Astrograph
* Camera: ZWO ASI 2600MC-PRO
* Filter: Optolong L-eXtreme
* Mount: Orion Sirius EQ-G
* Guide: William Optics 32mm; ZWO ASI 120MM Mini
* Control: ASIAIR Plus, ZWO EAF
* Software: PixInsight, Lightroom, Topaz DeNoise AI
* 600 x 120 seconds
Total integration time: 20 hours
By Lee Pullen
Example source data
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