Heart & Soul nebula in Hubble palette

[jarbi]

Hi,

Last saturday evening it was cleared out and I had time as well - rare coincidence. I have decided to image the Heart & Soul nebula as long as possible, but weather decided to stop me just after 135 min. exposure.

Some technical details: I was using my EQ6 Atlas mount with a TS 70 mm ED refractor, TS 2" flattener and an Atik 11000 mono CCD with EFW2 filterwheel. My filterset was a Baader narrowband set ( SII, Ha, OIII ), and I took 3x15 min. guided frames for each channel in 2x2 binning ( guiding with PHD and EQASCOM ). I have automated the capture process with SGPro. Seeing was not really good caused by a strong wind, and I detected also some high clouds passing by.

For preprocessing ( darks, flats, alignment, basic stretching, color synthesis )  I used Nebulosity 3, final touches ( levels, curves, noise reduction, Hubble palette color adjustments ) were done in Photoshop. The exposure was obviously not long enough, but I am still surprised how it came out at my location (  3 km from Brussels Airport , mag. 18 sky ).

Left from the Heart nebula you can also find an open cluster NGC-1027 , SH 2-192 and SH 2-196 ( forms one line with NGC-1027 left and up from the cluster),

All remarks are welcome ;-),

Clear skies

Janos

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[Andy_E]

Stunning images. As a visual observer the heart and soul nebs' often make me rather jealous of imagers!

[jarbi]

Stunning images. As a visual observer the heart and soul nebs' often make me rather jealous of imagers!

Thanks Andy,

Clear skies,

Janos

[ultranova]

Under the circumstances You have done a very nice job indeed

Do you think you will go back on this one for more data.

Paul

[stargazer1960]

A stunning image ......

[jarbi]

Under the circumstances You have done a very nice job indeed

Do you think you will go back on this one for more data.

Paul

Thank you !

I will certainly do it, since this is now the ideal time to image these objects. They are positioned  just high enough to begin the session when it gets dark, and far enough from the meridian to capture many frames without meridian flip. As it seems I may give it a go this evening, let's hope it stays clear ;-)

Cheers,

Janos

[broca]

Nice colors and contrast!

[Gina]

Beautiful - great image