NGC 7023 - Iris Nebula

[Hughsie]

For me, NGC 7023 is situated well for imaging featuring high in the North and rising.

This is a reflection nebula located within the constellation Cepheus. A magnitude +7 star which itself is part of a small star cluster lights up the gas giving it its blue hue. Dust also surrounds the nebula which obscures the light of some of the background stars. 

This image is made up of 20 exposures. I would have liked to have captured more data but unfortunately the clouds drifted into view.

Taken with the ZWO ASI294MC Pro Cooled camera; 20 x 180s exposures; IDAS D2 LPS filter used.

John

[carastro]

Well done for such little data.  Also presuming as you were using an IDAS filter you are shooting this from a LP location, so well done on that front too.  What Bortle scale are you? 

There is a bit more data to be teased out by the way.

Carole 

[Hughsie]

Thank you Carole.

Bortle 4 skies here. I’m going to keep at it as I would really like to bring out the dark regions of dust without blowing out any other detail. Thoughts and ideas welcome!

John

[AstroKane]

Yeah, really nice John.

Kane

[Hughsie]

I originally posted a cropped version of the image as there was a large circular artefact positioned in the bottom left hand corner of the original that my flats did not remove. I can only imagine that whatever was on the lens when I took these exposures disappeared by the time I took my flats the next day as there was no sign of the same artefact in the flats. This morning I created a synthetic flat using PixInsight and applied this using pixelmath - Original x (mean Flat)/Flat - which did a good job removing the artefact.