Some Sharpless: Sh2-168 & Sh2-169

[Tom How]

A couple of lesser known Sharpless catalogue objects. It was a bit murky last night, and the Moon is still knocking on the door, but this came out better than I expected.

Sh2-168 is the bright object in the upper left - it is surprisingly bright and I'm curious why it isn't imaged more. I bet this looks superb in Hubble palette....

Sh2-169 is the dim region in the lower middle - very faint and right on the edge of detection.

Plus the usual amount of background fluff you expect in this neck of the woods.

The nights are gaining some traction now. Got 21x1200s in one night which afforded me the chance to get picky so I only stacked the best 17 frames giving just over 5.5 hours total exposure with the 3nm Ha filter.

SH2-168 Sharpless HII regions. Sh2-169 and Sh2-168

Equipment

Homemade Telescope mount

3nm Astrodon Ha filter

Skywatcher 200 Newt (upgraded with OO Hilux secondary)

Baader Focuser

Homemade focus motor

Homemade filterwheel / OAG combo with Lodestar guide camera

Artemis 285 CCD camera

[Martin-Devon]

Nice image, and well done on going for these less-trodden Sharpless targets - there's some gems in there as illustrated by your shot.

Martin

[psemil]

I want to congratulate you for the image and for making your own setup.

Good work

[SnakeyJ]

Very nice image Tom - strangely enough I happened on your site this morning while looking at M51 images to link in another thread (very good it was to).

Jake