Month: November 2017

IC1848 Soul nebula

November 23, 2017
H II nebula
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Soul nebula is a beautiful HII region, where new stars are being born. It’s located in the constellation Cassiopeia and it’s 7500 light-years from Earth. The nebula has a neighbor Heart Nebula (IC1805). One can say that in this constellation the heart and soul are close to each other.

As usual, I used narrow-band filters to capture this spectacular nebula. It didn’t fit into my field of view; this means I would need a shorter focal length.

Update 2023-05-07. I returned to this data and reprocessed it, using the latest post-processing know-how. I learned a lot in the last few years, and Pixinsight got very useful plugins. For example, Blur Exterminator sharpens the data, but it still looks realistic without any artifacts. However, the biggest difference is the white balance of the picture. I used the rainbow SHO technique published by
lukomatico.

Technical details

Telescope:Newton 150/600 mm
Aperture:150 mm
Focal length:438 mm
MountGemini G53f
AutoguidingTS 60 mm, ZWO 174 MM
Camera:Moravian instruments G2 8300M @-30C
Corrector:ASA 0.73 reducer
Filters:Baader narrow band
Exposure:8x77xHa, 77xOIII, 77xSII 180 s, bin 1×1,
Date:2017-11-23

IC5070 Pelican nebula

November 15, 2017
H II nebula
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Pelican nebula is large cloud of hydrogen gas, where many stars are being born, located in constellation Cygnus (Swan). The nebula is approximately 2000 light-years away from Earth. If you use bit of an imagination, you will be able to see the pelican in the dark cloud surrounding the brighter center of the nebula – good luck with searching.

The picture was taken completely by narrow band filters. The first one is in “fake” Hubble palette and second one as a bi-color image (Ha in red channel, OIII in green and blue channel).

Technical details

Telescope:Newton 150/600 mm
Aperture:150 mm
Focal length:438 mm
MountGemini G53f
AutoguidingTS 60 mm, ZWO 174 MM
Camera:Moravian instruments G2 8300M @-30C
Corrector:ASA 0.73 reducer
Filters:Baader narrow band
Exposure:8x32xHa, 32xOIII, 32xSII 180 s, bin 1x1,
Date:2017-12-15

Neptune

November 9, 2017
Solar system
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Since Pluto is no longer a planet, the privilege to be the last planet of the Solar System belongs to Neptune. Neptune is after Jupiter and Saturn the third most-massive planet. It has approximately 17 times more mass than Earth. One year on Neptune takes 164.8 years, because the distance between Sun and Neptune is 30 times longer than between Earth and Sun. The planet got its name from Roman mythology, specifically after the god of the sea – the mighty Neptune.

Neptune cannot be spotted by a naked eye, therefore one needs telescope. Even if you have one and you manage to find it, you will not see any details on Neptune’s surface. You will see just boring small spot.

The picture was taken by my biggest telescope Celestron C14. The focal length 4000 mm was increased by 1.6 Barlow lens to 6400 mm. The seeing was, as usual, very bad, therefore there are no details visible and the picture looks not perfectly focused and unsharp. I just wanted to try to capture it and here is the outcome:

Technical details

Telescope:Celestron EdgeHD C14
Aperture:354 mm
Focal length:6256 mm
MountGemini G53f
Autoguiding-
Camera:ZWO ASI228MC
Corrector:Barlow 1.6
Filters:-
Exposure:1000xL (35% used), 610 ms, Gain 353
Date:2017-10-12