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Blending L-extreme Ha/OIII data with UV/IR filter for OSC nebula imaging

Optolong L-eXtreme Optolong UV/IR cut 2" Pleiades Astrophoto PixInsight ZWO ASI2600MC Pro
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Irenee Houngblame avatar
Irenee Houngblame avatar

BLUF: How to properly blend an image shot with the L-extreme with all my Ha/Oiii data with my UV/IR filter containing my dark nebula and associated dust?

I’m attending a star party soon and finally decided on an object. I want to capture the Flying bat, Squid, and Seahorse nebula in one frame and I’d be doing this with an OSC camera (2600MC pro) with my Askar FRA400 with reducer attached.

I know this is a difficult target especially for OSC but I’ve got a week and dark skies. My plan is to capture several night of Ha/Oiii data with my L-eXtreme then use my UV/IR filter to get more of the dark nebula and associated dust.

If all goes according to plan, how can I properly process this? I figure that I’ll need to process the two filtered images separately but what would be the best way to blend them after the fact in Pixinsight? I have photoshop as well if there are better methods there.

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andrea tasselli avatar
andrea tasselli avatar

Add them up after normalization.

Joon Ren avatar
Joon Ren avatar

Hi Irenee, you can use continuum subtraction with the NB colour mapper script like this https://www.youtube.com/live/-CmCEKFPBTE?t=3114&si=WNvQM8HfJFbueHd-

For OSC you can combine Ha (Red layer of the L-extreme data) with the RGB image with a similar process for the Oiii.

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Mikołaj Wadowski avatar
Mikołaj Wadowski avatar

One important thing to remember is you need to subtract the Ha leakage from the G and B channels and then combine them when shooting dualband. I put an example of how to do it here in step 1.

Other than that it’s effectively the same. I recommend following this guide, though you should know that the first method has since been superseded by this script.

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Irenee Houngblame avatar
Irenee Houngblame avatar

Mikołaj Wadowski · Jul 11, 2026 at 08:22 PM

One important thing to remember is you need to subtract the Ha leakage from the G and B channels and then combine them when shooting dualband. I put an example of how to do it here in step 1.

Other than that it’s effectively the same. I recommend following this guide, though you should know that the first method has since been superseded by this script.

Thank you for the resources, this was very helpful. I’ll have to try it once I accumulate all the data!

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