Van den Bergh 123 and neighbors

[Francesco Meschia]

Hello SJAA imagers,

Almost three weeks ago I went imaging to a Bortle 2 spot in the Los Padres National Forest near Big Sur, CA. My target was the group of molecular clouds in Serpens around the VdB 123 reflection nebula. I had chosen this target first of all because I love faint dust, but also because the forecast was for very poor seeing (Northern California was under a jet stream those days), so I would need to use my wider field rig which, due to its image scale, is less sensitive to seeing than my main one.

What the forecast hadn’t seen was that, until 1 AM or so, a nasty, gusty wind kept on blowing down the valley. I was prepared for unusable subs due to shakes from the wind, but to my surprise my rig managed to keep the scope steady despite being unshielded from the winds. It turned out that I had collected almost 5 hours of good data, which for the night of the summer solstice is not too bad at all.

The image I produced is visible on Astrobin, where it just became a Top Pick, at https://app.astrobin.com/i/4hi2nf.
For those of you who are interested in the nitty-gritty processing details, I also published a detailed walkthrough of my processing workflow, at https://maketronica.wordpress.com/2025/07/08/van-den-bergh-123-and-neighbors/

Comments, questions, critique are welcome and appreciated!
Francesco

[Rajah]

Congrats Francesco! Excellent image as always. Processing must have been challenging. The star field is so dense. Thanks for sharing the workflow details, seems very detailed. I wish everyone shared their workflow steps like this :D, maybe you are setting a trend for others to follow.

Thanks,

Rajah

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[Stuart Heggie]

Gorgeous shot Francesco! Really appreciate the processing notes as well.

Stuart Heggie

https://www.stuartheggie.com/f783431253

[Aris Pope]

Well done, congrats!!

Aris

[Scott SCHNEIDER]

Congrats Francesco. Well done.

Scott

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[Nikola Nikolov]

Congratulations, Francesco 

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[Rich Klein]

Congrats Francesco!  Great image!

- Rich

[Akshay Subramaniam]

Great image Francesco, the top pick award is well deserved. I especially liked the color treatment in the main VDB 123 region and also the little orange reflection regions.

I recently processed a similar dense star field image and had many similar steps to yours (modulo OSC vs mono ofc). I've been using an inverse GHS for RGB starmasks to preserve color in bright star cores. Do you have thoughts on that vs the H/Sv smoothing method you use?

Thanks,

Akshay

[Francesco Meschia]

Thanks, Akshay! I heard of masked stretching, of course, but I have never heard of the technique you mentioned using inverted GHS. Would you be able to share some details?

Francesco

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[Ray Poudrier]

Very nice image, and I really appreciate the time you take to do the write-ups! They're informative and helpful!