There were two more nights of the new moon that I was able to use. On the first I added a couple of hours of frames for each of my Veil Nebula mosaic panes, then decided to use the last hour of darkness to add to my Cocoon frames.
The preliminary processing of the 110 frames gave me this:
Yes, it's a bit overprocessed and some of the stars have dark halos, but I was seduced by how well the dust around the Cocoon showed up. I like the 3D impression caused by the dark background, even if it was forced. My last effort (2013) of this was in H alpha narrowband and completely missed the dust. All the image details are at AstroBin. I'll probably reprocess this during the cold winter months.
The second night I was able to add an hour for each of the panes of my Veil mosaic, giving me 246 and 240 frames for the north and south panes, respectively. That's 4.1 and 4 hours on each pane!
Here is the result:
The result is very sensitive to the Stretch Amount setting in the PixInsight process StarStretch. StarStretch moves the star image to nonlinear just before you recombine the stars with the starless image. A Stretch Amount of 5 is what you see above, but using a value of 4 de-emphasizes the stars and provides a better look at the nebula and the dust clouds:
See what I mean? What I like about adjusting this parameter is that it essentially works like a star size reducer. When I do a winter reprocess of this I'll probably play more with the Stretch Amount.
That's it for now. Next up is the Iowa Star Party; if I can get one clear night, I'll probably shoot the Soul Nebula from dusk to dawn. I'm not counting on getting more than that, but miracles happen; I'd better make plans just in case. Maybe something with my 135 mm Samyang?
