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Soul Nebula in H-alpha and OIII

The Soul Nebula is an active star-forming region with plenty of young stars (in the tens-of-millions-years-old range, rather than billions).
This image is in "false" color, where hydrogen emission light at 656 nm is represented by red, and oxygen at 500 nm by blue.
The first time I processed this image I tried mightily to dig the OIII signal out of the data and have it show up as a nice blue or blue-green. But even though I'd shot way more OIII than Ha, it just wasn't happening, at least without really objectionable noise. Second time around I let the hydrogen just be its pushy, ubiquitous self and used a color-balance layer and some masking to hand-draw the oxygen-rich regions in blue, with the OIII integration beside me for reference. This let me use a much lighter touch overall and, indeed, the reprocessing (starting with the Ha and OIII integrations) took only 90 minutes.
Soul Nebula in H-alpha and OIII

Soul Nebula in H-alpha and OIII

The Soul Nebula is an active star-forming region with plenty of young stars (in the tens-of-millions-years-old range, rather than billions).
This image is in "false" color, where hydrogen emission light at 656 nm is represented by red, and oxygen at 500 nm by blue.
The first time I processed this image I tried mightily to dig the OIII signal out of the data and have it show up as a nice blue or blue-green. But even though I'd shot way more OIII than Ha, it just wasn't happening, at least without really objectionable noise. Second time around I let the hydrogen just be its pushy, ubiquitous self and used a color-balance layer and some masking to hand-draw the oxygen-rich regions in blue, with the OIII integration beside me for reference. This let me use a much lighter touch overall and, indeed, the reprocessing (starting with the Ha and OIII integrations) took only 90 minutes.