The Tarantula Nebula is a large and very luminous emission nebula in the Large Magellanic Cloud, a small satellite galaxy of the Milky Way. It is the most active starburst region known in all the Local Group of galaxies.
RGB H-alpha modified camera.
65 x 2 min = 2.2 hr total exposure
Stacked and processed in PixInsight with the following steps:
- Weighted Batch Preprocessing
... dark subtraction
... cosmetic correction
... local normalization
... integration by PSF Signal Weight
... drizzle integration
- Dynamic Background Extraction
- Spectrophotometric Color Calibration (G2V white ref.)
- BlurXTerminator
- Histogram Transform to non-linear
- StarNet2 to separate nebula from stars
- HDR Multiscale Transform
- Local Histogram Equalization
- Curves for contrast and saturation
- Shrink stars and recombine
- NoiseXTerminator
- Multiscale Linear Transform (sharpen)
Because my first processing attempt showed more blue than I expected, I tried again with a different white reference (G2V star) which resulted in more red. But I've since learned that this nebula emits strong Oxygen-III (blue) light along with Hydrogen-alpha (red). It's debatable which color balance is more "correct," so it may be viewer's choice.