Eta Carinae

Due to the extremely unfavorable weather in Hungary, I decided to make an “online tour” to Chile, and turn one of the best optics of the Telescope Live robotic telescope network, the 61-cm PlaneWave CDK24 towards this spectacular southern celestial object. From January the 14th to February 1st I collected nearly 2.5 hours of RGB and narrowband material on five nights from the surroundings of the star Eta Carinae. I have already taken a similar remote-controlled picture of this area before, but with a much wider field of view. I got to know the wonderful details of the inner areas of the nebula in more detail during my image processing a few years ago, and I decided to capture them in detail later.

In the last months I experimented a lot with the combination of traditional RGB and narrowband (Ha, SII, OIII) images, so there was no question that I was going to try to capture the surroundings of the Eta Carinae in this way as well. For the aesthetic image processing I used almost the same exposure times per filter, and for setting the colors I mixed the RGB and the narrowband material with the ratio of 50-50%. As a result it is not surprising that I got different colors than usual, which I tried to present in a natural and restrained way.