Crab Nebula - M1

[Jim McMillan]

At the risk of over-sharing again, I decided to post this. It was taken over 2 nights - the first 4.5 hours with a full moon a week ago, the second 1.5 hours last night. Seeing both nights was perhaps a bit better than normal for my location.

I did two things from a processing perspective that helped this image a lot:

1) Selectively used unsharp mask in MaxIm using the adu range from the dim tendrils to the brightest part of the nebula. I did this before applying ddp (with no sharpening). Doing it the other way around doesn't work near as well. Unfortunately, since a lot of the nebula is fairly bright, this meant some of the medium-bright stars were negatively affected by the unsharp mask.

2) Used layers in Photoshop Elements to use the unsharp masked nebula with a non-unsharped masked/ddp background version. This meant I got a sharp nebula without any of the star artifacts that were caused by the unsharp mask. (I tried using a non-ddp background which resulted in tighter but fewer background stars. I ended up preferring the version with more background stars.)

Once again, my message is that you can image bright objects and get pretty reasonable results even with a bright moon.

Jim