The Devil's Tower Nebula - RCW85 in natural colour - April 2024

This is an image of a not popular and rarely imaged and very faint nebula located almost exactly in between Alpha and Beta Centauri making it a deep southern sky object.

It’s labeled as ”The Devils Tower”, resembling the "Devil's Tower National Monument" in the USA. This nebula is about 6000 light year away and it is number 85 in the RCW (Rodgers, Campbell & Whiteoak) catalog… which is an astronomical catalogue or Hα-emission regions in the southern Milky Way.

This image was exposed through a C8 SCT at f6.3 with a QHY268M camera cooled to -5°C on 13th and 14th April 2024, ending on the morning of the 15th.

The total integration time for this image was only 8 hours and 18 minutes of just RGB wideband subs, consisting of 53x120s of Red, 49x180s of Green and 49x300s of Blue channel exposures.

Software used to capture, stack and process this image was APT 4.42, PHD 2.6.13, DSS 5.1.5, Siril 1.2.1 and Photoshop.