NGC 7023 - The Iris Nebula in Cepheus

[MartinB]

This is mainly a dark sooty sort of nebula but a bright star lights up a bit of it to give a blue reflection area. It's in Cepheus. I couldn't see anything other than a star visually through my ED120.

Captured over 2 nights - Thurs and Fri with a William Optics FLT 110 on loan from Steve FLO.

Got about 4 hours worth of unbinned blue 30x500 I figured that since the neb is blue I might as well use blue as the luminence and save myself an hour's time. 60 mins each of green and blue 60x1min

Unfortunately the camera was rotated slightly differently on the 2 nights causing me to have to do some cropping - have finally sussed that I need to leave the camera nose piece in the mount between sessions, then it will screw into exactly the same position.

As always, captured and stacked with Maxim and processed in PS.

Still some noise despite the exposure but I like the way the sooty bits on the outside are showing. At first I thought I had some dust bunnies!

(click to enlarge)

This is the mono

(click to enlarge)

[SteveL]

beautiful!

[mik]

Very nice.

Mick.

[centroid]

I like your one Martin, you've left a lot of the outlaying 'gas' in there, despite the 'noise' I think it adds to the image.

I 'trimmed' some of the more 'noisy' outer gas cloud from mine, using the Histogram sliders, to make try and make it look a bit more photogenic, albeit less scientific

Dave

[barkis]

She's Quite a splendid object is Iris, and you have painted her portrait nicely Martin.

Ron.

[Kaptain Klevtsov]

Very nice image indeed Martin. I wonder if this would be a good DSLR target as the stuff is mainly blue? My Nikon likes blue more than red, so I might give this a try if I get a chance.

Kaptain klevtsov

[MartinB]

Thanks guys. Isn't it great to have the weather to get some decent exposure times. KK - the iris bit should be fine with a DSLR but the outer reflection and smoke is very dim and I think I DSLR will struggle to pull much out.

[CELESCOPE]

nice one again Martin , yup nice to see everyone out now , lol, except poor ole me lol oh well ,

Rog

[steppenwolf]

This is very nice, Martin. I too have recently imaged this object and it is deceptively tricky because of that bright star!

[markcol]

Beautiful detail and colour there Martin, lovely image.

Mark