Lucky Imaging in the Clouds

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Weather conditions had been pretty mediocre over the last couple of weeks. In addition to the almost full moon clouds kept moving though, so a majority of the frames I took were unusable. It really felt more like "lucky imaging" than a regular session of deep sky photography.

I did a more thorough analysis of the raw frames and noticed that the presence of the Moon has quite an impact on the image quality, even for narrowband pictures. However, I noticed as well that apparently the final images still are benefiting from including the frames with poor signal to noise ratio (eg. due to thin clouds moving through). In the following images I included all the frames, where the nebula was at least visible, even if they had a poor SNR.

I guess this approach of imaging at almost full moon at poor weather will not be viable for fainter objects, but I think the results show that it may be still worth it for the brighter nebulae.

I am never sure if I like the natural colors or the HOO palette more, so I am including both versions here.









In the image of the Lion Nebula I noticed cute little planetary nebula in the bottom left third. It is PN G101.5-00.6 - see this magnified picture.




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