Cosmic Reef

I had been curious to try the Optolong L-eXtreme and L-Synergy filters for some time, particularly to see how their different emission bands could be combined to create a palette. Thanks to the Telescope Network setup in Chile's Atacama Desert, I finally had the opportunity to test them myself. The field captures a rich star-forming region of the Large Magellanic Cloud (LMC), in the constellation Dorado. It includes NGC 2014, a bright H II region, and NGC 2020, a nebula shaped by the powerful stellar winds of a Wolf-Rayet star. Together, they form the famous Cosmic Reef. Also present are NGC 2030, NGC 1955 and NGC 1954, part of the LMC's complex environment of young star clusters and ionized gas. The image was processed using a Foraxx palette, starting from the separation of the emission channels recorded by each filter: for L-eXtreme (4h 50m) the R channel maps to Hα and the G/B channels to [O III]; for L-Synergy (1h 30m) the R channel maps to [S II] and the G/B channels to [O III]. The extracted channels were then combined in PixelMath following the Foraxx formula. All data were acquired under a full Moon. With relatively limited integration time and increased background brightness, noise reduction proved challenging. I had to apply NoiseXTerminator several times: it helped control the noise, but left the background looking somewhat less natural than I would have liked. Despite these limitations, it was an interesting opportunity to experiment with two complementary dual-band filters and evaluate their potential.