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SH2-114 The Flying Dragon


szymon

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This has always been one of my favourite nebulae -- I have a thing for dragons (the fighting dragons are my favourite in the southern skies).  Since I image from Bortle 8 LPLondon, I wasn't sure whether I'd be able to do justice to this very faint nebula; there is no signal whatsoever on my individual subs!  Nonetheless I am not displeased with the results.

This image was taken with a new setup for me, and it does have some obvious defects.  First off, the corner stars are a mess -- I have tilt and spacing issues, and I am waiting on some adapters to arrive so that I can fix them, so this is a "best efforts" spacing only 🙂.  In addition, when taking this image I didn't yet have my DeepSkyDad AF3 set up on the Vixen, so I was focusing by hand with a Bhatinov mask.  The focus seemed to hold pretty well (I had heard horror stories of Vixen focusers but the one on my quad seems to be very good indeed), but I'm sure it could have been tighter (I usually set up an AF run if HFR increases by 10%).

I do feel that my processing lets me down somewhat.  The final edit I chose brings the Ha and Sii into the Red channel at around the correct frequencies and uses the stars from the RGB frames.  My original idea was to just go with a duo-band Ha/Sii presentation, but it didn't really have the depth that I wanted, so I grabbed some RGB in order to get the star colours.  I will probably go back to the data at some future point and process it again.

Total of 32 hours exposure:
• 240 x 300s Ha
• 90 x 300s Sii
• 18 x 300s R,G,B

Hardware:
• ZWO ASI1600MM-Cool
• Vixen AX103S Quad
• Vixen 0.7x Reducer
• ZWO EFW3 Filter Wheel
• Antlia 36mm 3.5nm SHO Filters
• Baader 36mm LRGB Filters
• SkyWatcher HEQ5 Mount
• SkyWatcher Evoguide 50ED
• Altair 290C as Guide Camera

Software:
• N.I.N.A. -- Capturing
• PHD2 -- Guiding
• ASTAP -- Plate Solving
• EzSuite — LiveStacking and Processing
• PixInsight — Final Processing Tweaks

Red_Final.thumb.png.575b176cb67ea690e49102ee10615cc7.png

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