Lynds Dark Nebula 1251 under suboptimal conditions (Stadtkyll/Eifel, Germany)

[astrovirus]

Hi there,

As my backyard is still very light poluted by the "nice" streetlight just off the back of our garden, I have packed up all my gear and taken this with me on our family holiday trip. This year, we went to the lovely and dark Eifel in Germany. However, timing was not perfect as we arived just after full moon, and with the weather forecast suggesting that the second half of our first week would give a couple of clear nights, I had to work with a 80-50% lid moon on the 3 nights spent on this object. Furhermore, as I am only 2 degrees further to the South as my home location, I also don't have true astronomical darkness around here. So my SQM values (as measured with my DIY Light Polution Meter) started at 19.50-19.60 and probably
increased somewhat during the session (which I didn't measuered, as I was sleeping alongside the telescope in order not to be too sleep deprived durng the day time for the family, ;-)). So, despite the suboptimal conditions, I managed to aquire 12 hours and 40 minutes of data duting the course of 3 nights (24, 26, and 26 10 minute subs) at ISO 800 with the peltier-cooled Canon 350Da (TEC@10°C with ambient temps varying from 15°C to 25°C during the nights). Scope was my 8" Newton/MPCC on the NEQ6/EQmod/CdC, guided with the 9x50 QHY5 finder guider. Data was calibrated with 18 dark frames, 20 bias fames and skyflats (20, 30, and 15 per session), all aquired using Nebulosity 2.5 and stacked in DSS 3.3.2. Post-processing was done using the DSLR-LRGB method in PS CS3 and Nebulosity 2.5 for color balance and DDP. Despite the suboptimal conditions, I am happy with the outcome of this image, although I will probably reshoot it when I have an opurtunity under darker conditions. Also the skyflats turned out to work OK, as I was struggling with my DIY EL panel which was resulting in gradients due to the light not being uniformly anymore (even visible by eye when looking to the lid panel, so no good).

[oldpink]

thats a very nice image

[Spoon]

Great shot!

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[Yoddha]

Stunning image, Tim!

[astrovirus]

Thanks for the nice words everyone.

[swag72]

I like that and I like the dust, but I personally find the stars a little on the red side - A little too saturated for my liking.

[astrovirus]

Thanks Sara,

I agree that I had to push the saturarion a bit high for this one, but it was a trade off for getting some color in the dust. Without the moon and perhaps a tad darker skies, this would have been much easier and with less saturation. For what it is worth with regards to the red stars, I wonder if that is my color blindness bugging me (which I am in both the reds and greens), although I always pay close attention to the histogram in PS, and keep it balanced, although in this one I pushed the red channel slightly more compared to green and blue. On the other hand, as this area is covered in dust, through which a large portion of the stars shine true, couldn't it be that this shifts the star color a bit more towards the reds?