Elephant Truck and the use of filtered (Optolong L-eNhance filter) and unfiltered data

The elephant trunk is one of the nicest regions of the summer sky. The surface brightness of the obejcts in this region are all low and the use of a filter will simplify the image as it will reduce the intensity from the stars and make the faint nebulosity to see.

so what does the final image look like this is the key part – the challeng here is that the images were taken about a week apart but here is the image Now this image is a combination of essentially 11 x 15 min images caputred with the filter and 15 x 10 min images captured without the filter

The reason for doing this was to allow the star brightness to increase as well as provide a smoother colour balance but what of the individual images.

the un filtered image was as expected – underwhelming…. the nebulosity is minimised and the stars are bright

So this woudl equate to a filtered image that is just awesome ! And it is …

Now this may not be seen as a fair comparison as the exposures are much longer for the L-enHance and this is correct. however this is just a function of the filter, as the stars are so faint it is easy to see that the combined images with the filter can integrate longer and pick fainter nebulosity out