Last night I did some astrophotography at the River Ridge Observatory before the Moon came up. This is the Cocoon Nebula aka IC5146 in Cygnus. This was shot with an IDAS NBZ UHS dual narrowband filter that lets Hydrogen Alpha and Oxygen III light through and little else. The former is red, the latter green. The blue channel was almost nonexistent. This was almost two hours of five minute shots with my 11″ SCT at f/6.3 and ZWO ASO 294MC Pro.
Friday, August 26, 2022 was a good night to observe. I set up my 11″ SCT, Elf, with my ZWO ASI 294 Pro camera at f/6.3. I started with the Eagle Nebula (M16) in Serpens then later I switched to the Crescent Nebula in Cygnus. In both cases, I set up a session of 30 5 minute images at a gain of 300. This means a total of as much as 2.5 hours. The first finished at about 12:30 and the other at 3AM. Around midnight I noticed the Milky Way very bright and that the Pleiades had cleared the trees. Then, I spotted bright orange/red “star” through a gap in the trees that I knew immediately had to be Mars. I had lost track of it and now it was at least two magnitudes brighter than it was the last time I saw it. When I finished and left at 3:40, Orion was just rising.
Both of these images were shot and processed similarly. I used StarNet++ to remove the stars so that I could process the nebula separately.
NGC 2174 is an emission nebula in the constellation of Orion. The belt of Orion points (to the left) toward it at about their width. I have it upside down here to make it a little more obvious where the nickname came from.
