NGC 1528

[Hughsie]

Coming off a full Moon, the evening of 26th January 2024 didn't present many broadband opportunities. Ideally, I wanted to use the ZWO ASI294MC camera for a single night project and so as I like star clusters I chose NGC 1528.

Some of my other favourite targets are those contained in the Sharpless Catalogue and having reviewed NGC 1528 in Astrobin I became aware that Sh2-209 would fall into the frame. Even though Sh2-209 is a small target, I wanted to include as much of this in the image and so added my Optolong L-Extreme filter to the filter wheel. I then split my time imaging between the Chroma UV/IR filter and the Optolong L-Extreme.

Using the WBPP script in PixInsight I generated the separate R, G and B channels for the star field. Running the script again with the L-Extreme data I was able to create a narrowband image of the star field and Sh2-209. It was then a case of processing the RGB star field, then the narrowband version, removing the stars from the latter and adding Sh2-209 into the RGB version using Pixelmath.

Data

• UV/IR 100 x 180 s
• L-Extreme 29 x 300 s
• Flats x 30; Dark Flats x 30; Darks x 50.
• Total integration time 5h 45'

Equipment

• William Optics Z103 refractor
• ZWO ASI294MC camera.
• Sky-Watcher EQ6R Pro mount.
• Sesto Senso motor focuser.
• William Optics Angle Rotator.
• ZWO filter wheel.

Software

• N.I.N.A with Hocus Focus plug-in ( Hocus Focus really help reduce the HFR of the image. Typically I am at 2.2 ish HFR but this went as low as 1.9).
• PHD 2.
• PixInsight.

 

 

 

[RobertI]

Lovely rendition of this pair John. I don’t think open clusters are given enough imaging attention, especially when there are “two in a view”. 🙂