L-Enhance for Galaxy Enhancement?

Phil Creed:
I took a little over 3 hours of OSC data on M81 and M82 using an ASI 533MC-Pro with just a UV/IR cut filter under a Bortle 6 sky.  Here's what I've got so far:

https://www.astrobin.com/a3tu2v/

Question -- if I take an extra 1-2 hours using just the L-Enhance filter, is it more likely to embellish the H-alpha regions at the cost of some color balance, or provide a marginal H-alpha enhancement and totally wreck the color balance?

Put another way, if I want those H-alpha regions to "pop" (particularly the starburst section of M82), what's the best course of action with a OSC camera?

Clear Skies,
Phil

Hello Phil,
The way that I would approach this is I’d have shot most of the data with a BB filter or even a UV/IR Cut filter process that data then I’d process the data you have with the L-Enhance as it h as the Ha data and extract the Ha channel and then add it back to a RGB color image of the object. At least thats how I would approach it. Others may offer another option.

Nice image BTW!

Dale

If you have PixInsight there is NBRGBCombination and EmissionLineIntegration scripts.
I've been thinking about other ways to use H-alpha.  I agree with the L-enhance you'd take the R channel as H-alpha.  If you removed stars and created a mask from it you could use it to boost red color in the RGB stack.  But I wouldn't integrate the UV/IR cut data directly with the L-enhance data.

I'm still working on this one as I get  time so I can bring up background levels quite a bit to show the IFN that is there. This is similar to what you are doing. It is 14hrs through a UV/IR filter and 6hrs through the L-Ultimate filter using a SVX127D scope and QHY410C cam. I simply processed both the narrow band and UV/IR images completely but aligned to the same reference image. Then masked the galaxies so I could use pixel math to blend the images together to taste only for the galaxies. Each of the three galaxies has a different blend. I personally did not like the results any of the other popular methods were giving me but that's all personal taste. It's an idea if this is something like you are looking for.  An accurate and highly blurred mask is critical for this to work. The "Game" script for Pixinsight by Herbert Walter comes in very handy for me for things like this.
CS,
Jeff

If you use PixInSight, I suggest splitting the RGB  data into individual channels via RGB extract. First process the RGB and L-enhance data to a non-linear state. Make sure to color balance the RGB before the strech.   Then remove the stars. Save the RGB stars so you can put them  back later.  Then extract the RGB channels. Use the L-enhance data as your Ha and combine it with the Red channel. Several ways to do this.  NBRGB combine or watch one of many excellent videos- Shawn/Visible Dark, Adam Block, High Point Scientific, PaulyAstroman,  Bill Blanshan, etc.  Recombine the new Red/Ha with G and B. Replace stars and finishing touches.  I just posted my HaRGB of M81, M82 using this approach. Check it out.

Just try it. I've also done that too. Results were actually pretty good.