Heart Nebula

Having recently returned from an amazing week on Lake Windemere and some lovely clear skies, that is apart from the full moon obliterating any decent view of the Perseid meteors. I had a few great eveinings doing some light painting on the lake. This means the scope has had a week off from action. So the new project is going to be an HOO image of the Heart Nebula IC1805. 5 minute sub exposures starting with the Optolong Ha filter. A total so far of 40 subs with a total of 200 minutes. A lucky capture on my first sub was a meteor breaking the Heart in two.

Over 3 nights I have been able to shoot Oiii data with 73 x 5 minute sub frames totalling 6Hr & 5 minutes. An induvidual sub offers the faintest hint of detail.

The full stack of 73 frames shows a vast amount of detail and a really clean noise free master frame. For some reason my blog will not let me upload the TIFF file so these Oiii frames are JPEGS (aghhhhhh)

I followed the same Pixinsight processing as before for the Crescent nebula. I am still new to this amazing programme and need YouTube tutorials to follow. I feel I have overdone the contrast here of on the final Star reduced image, so I will be looking at a few more Ha hours to boost the outer ring of Hydrogen gas. Watch this space. But for now please enjoy my Heart Nebula. A fitting tribute to Mum too, she sadly passed away some twelve years ago on this day.

One last thing to mention is the guiding, after some welcome rain the skies have been very transparent and the guide numbers have been incredible with RMS totals under 0.25 arc seconds. Images of the guide screen are on the tablet so I will try and upload a screenshot.