Jul 15, 20226 min read

Narrowband Deep Sky Objects - What to Expect With Each Filter?

Updated: Jul 20, 2023

On this page, you will find a list of narrowband objects we have captured over the years with our monochrome camera. Each object will have screenshots of what the data for each filter used looked like. This way, you can quickly know what to expect when imaging these objects, and decide what filter to skip or spend the most time on.

A link to our full blog post containing our final image processed from these shots, much more information, and tips on how to capture it will also be displayed for each object.

We would like to thank Georg Woeber for this great idea he had during our fourth Galactic Hangout live stream. Galactic Hangouts occur quarterly and all Patreons/Galactic Course members are invited!

Expand the list below to quickly see if your target is on this page:

Messier Objects

Messier 1 - The Crab Nebula

Messier 8 - The Lagoon Nebula

Messier 16 - The Eagle Nebula

Messier 17 - The Omega Nebula

Messier 20 - The Trifid Nebula

Messier 27 - The Dumbbell Nebula

Messier 42 - The Orion Nebula

Messier 43 - De Mairan's Nebula

Messier 76 - The Little Dumbbell Nebula

Messier 97 - The Owl Nebula

NGC Objects

IC Objects

Sharpless Objects

Other Objects

Important Notes:

Some pictures may be difficult to see. You should be able to expand the image but they will look blurry (each image is heavily compressed or else this page would take years to load). Sometimes, more information about the filters used is available on the full blog post for each picture. The goal of this post is to quickly see, at a glance, the difference in signal between different filters, not to zoom in on any tiny detail :)
This list will take years to complete, so it is normal that several objects are still missing! Also, as of today, we can't image deep sky objects in the southern hemisphere, so if you know a friend who owns an observatory in the south, ask them to let us use it once in a while to populate this list 😎😃.
This list is mostly made up of emission nebulae with a few exceptions. We chose objects that are often captured with narrowband filters. We did not include broadband targets because we don't see much of a point.
The order of the images shown is always H - S - O. If there are only two pictures displayed, that means we did a bi-color combination using H and O filters unless stated otherwise.

Every guide on this website is free! If you find these useful, the best way to thank us is through Patreon. Plus, you also get some cool rewards 😎