It’s been cold and dreary and I don’t have any new images to process so I decided to reprocess this one from four years ago with PixInsight. The image is a combination of short and longer images to bring out the dimmer parts without blowing out the core. Hard to say which version is better. What I need and plan to do is reshoot the area with my newer gear when the weather allows.
I think I’ve reached the end of usable data from Friday night. The first image acquired (and last to be processed) is the Seahorse Nebula, one of my favorites since childhood. I also took another crack at a Pleiades widefield. I recently published a shot of the Pleiades taken with my ASI533MC Pro, this one was taken with my 2600MC Pro which has a significantly larger format.
One thing I love about astrophotography is you don’t have to take anyone’s word about stuff like this. You can take a telescope and camera, or sometimes just a camera, and take a picture of your own.
The Seahorse Nebula aka Barnard 150 aka LDN 1082 is a dark molecular cloud in the constellation of Cepheus. We see it mainly by the light it blocks. This was taken with my 11″ SCT with Hyperstar @ f/1.9 and ASI533MC Pro camera with an Antlia Triband RGB Ultra light pollution filter.
The Pleiades or Seven Sisters or Messier 45 is an open star cluster in the constellation of Taurus. Fun Fact: The two closest star clusters to Earth are both in Taurus. The other is known as the Hyades which make the face of Taurus the Bull. The nebulosity seen here is not related to the Pleiades but lies between us and the star cluster. That nebulosity was my main target as it is dim and not always easy to capture. This was taken with my Samyang 135mm lens and ASI2600MC Pro camera using the same Antlia Triband RGB Ultra light pollution filter.
I spent Friday night at the River Ridge Observatory shooting a few objects. I had two rigs going, three counting the stationary DSLR doing star trails. The long night allowed me to break it into three imaging sessions and the last one was dedicated to one object with two rigs – the Rosette Nebula in the constellation of Monoceros (the Unicorn).
The Rosette Nebula is a large cloud of energized hydrogen, an HII region we call it. It’s about a degree across, or about twice the apparent width of the Moon. Stars are forming inside it now. Click on each thumbnail for a larger view.
Here is a image of the region at low power – 135mm. Note the ring of red nebulosity in the upper left quadrant.
Compare that to this snippet from Stellarium. The small green squares represent emission nebula and match the ring seen in the upper image. And the green squares at the bottom match the red area at the bottom of the previous image.
Finally, a closeup of the Rosette taken at 539mm focal length.
