Cederblad 214 in SHO

[glowingturnip]

Here's my take on the snappily-named Cederblad 214, part of the larger SH2-171 complex in Cepheus, in SHO, taken in the summer:

Please click through for hi-res.

 

And a detail here:

26x 10min Ha and about 12 each of OIII and SII, a mixture of 10mins and 15mins for those once I realised how faint they were coming in (bit of a battle with chrominance noise tbh).  Equipment as per sig, Pixinsight processing, dark sky site in Spain.

 

Not exactly a pretty nebula, especially the way I've presented it here - I wanted it to be dark and tumultuous (think Goya  😉 ) and to have all that tortured dust speak for itself.  Possibly a little dark on this monitor, but I think better on other devices.  Mind you, having said that, it does remind me of a big floppy dog looking straight into camera - the two brightest stars as eyes, the central black cloud as nose and the two banks of nebulosity either side as big floppy ears.  So a dark and tortured big floppy dog.  Either that, or Darth Vader...

 

Cederblad 214 is a bright nebula and star-forming region in the wider SH2-171 area in Cepheus.  It contains the star cluster Berkeley 59 (bottom-left of centre in this image).  The complex is believed to be some 800–1000 parsecs distant, with the younger components aged no more than a few million years.  Within Cederblad 214 is one of the hottest known stars in our stellar neighborhood. With a temperature of almost 45,000 degrees Kelvin, BD+66 1673 is over 100,000 times more luminous than our own Sun.  It is fairly unremarkable in this image though, it's below and slightly to the left of the star cluster with a little bit of illuminated shockwave next to it.

 

Hope you like it - comments and cc welcome 🙂

 

Stuart

 

[Allinthehead]

Love the colours in this.

[Miguel1983]

nicely done !

[GiorgioF]

I like. I genuinely like but maybe the stars are to much...dry. 

They look not natural to me. A small halo will give maybe a better result 

For the nebula I like the contrast between light and dark. 

[glowingturnip]

thanks all !

Interesting comment re the stars, and I think I see what you mean.  I use the Metsavainio Tone Map technique (http://www.arciereceleste.it/articoli/translations/75-narrowband-color-composition-eng) to avoid getting magenta stars in my narrowband, which I guess is why most of my stars are just plain white here, and I think it's that lack of colour that you're noticing.  The exceptions are the larger stars where the tonemap technique doesn't work for me, I get artifacts where the star-bursts are different sizes for the different filters.  Those large stars I've handled with the usual de-magenta-ing which has ended up giving them that golden-yellow colour - completely unnatural, but I quite like it 🙂

I've not done any star-reduction or anything like that, and there were no halos to start with (am certainly not going to add one)