The Cat's Paw

It's taken me a while to get a satisfactory rendition of NGC 6334, the Cat's Paw. My first version was a very labour-intensive 3x3 mosaic taken with CHI-1 in the early days of TL, before wider-angle telescopes were available in the South. This new version was obtained with CHI-2, for which the target nicely fills the frame.

However, poor weather meant that the OIII integrations secured were not really adequate, so the more highly ionized regions, portrayed in blue, did not stand out well. I therefore transferred the colours from the CHI-1 image to this CHI-2 version.

I've given this rendition a lot of 'crunch' (high-pass filtering) to emphasize structural details, as the good signal in the Ha and SII channels allowed this.