Boosting detail in nebula photos - a case study

ASTROPHOTOGRAPHY PROCESSING | Expert processing tips to enhance your astrophotos | Combine RGB and narrowband data to give deep, rich images 

- Bray Falls

In 2022, my image of NGC 6888, the Crescent Nebula was shortlisted for the Astronomy Photographer of the Year competition. In this article I hope to give you an idea of how the image was created.

The first step with any astrophoto is to collect the data. This stage is crucial because the quality of the starting data will determine how good the finished image is; 45 hours of very high-quality data was collected for this image. Once collected, I moved onto processing, and the first step here was image calibration and integration.

These steps removed artefacts from the raw data and averaged together a large dataset to remove random noise from the final image. This was absolutely necessary because the signal in any single capture is very faint. We had to average together many images to improve it, and this had to be done for each filter used. In the case of this image, there were five different filters, shown in Figure 1.