SH2-155 : The Cave Nebula Full Colour

[Catanonia]

Been working for some time on this unusual and not imaged much target.

SH2-155 The Cave Nebula up near the house. A very faint nebula with lots of bright stars around it making imaging fairly difficult.

This is about 5 hours captured on my Skywatcher ED120 F7.5 900mm with a EOS 350 modded dslr with Astronomik CLS LP clip filter.

All guided with ED80 and QHY5 and PHD.

5 mins subs and flats , darks and dark flats applied throughout the 2 nights.

Posted 2 pictures, full and a 100% crop of the actual target.

Hopefully it is worth viewing, I think I balanced out the colours right as there is a lot of red up there. Can see the blue reflective nebulocity in the core and the funny square shape it makes.

Tried to find pictures on google to compare, and there isn't many good ones out there, so hard to compare.

Over to you guys for C&C

100% crop of the core

Cat

[Doc]

Amazing work Cat on an object that is photographed rarely.

[JCJC]

That has come out really nicely Cat, it was nice to chat while the subs were rolling in as well

Jordan

[Starflyer]

Great image cat, really like the wider field version.

[Catanonia]

Cheers guys, took ages to balance this one out. So much red up there and stretching the image too much gives to much of it. I found I needed loads more subs to get the image right.

[Aza]

Dont think I have seen this one before!

I would suggest you stop using the smoothing and noise reductions though.

Personally I think they are damaging your images

With 5 hours you should have some good data, and should not need so much smoothing.

Can you post a version without for comparison?

[Catanonia]

Aza,

Seriously, there is very minimal smoothing done on this image, none by me. I tend not to use smooth or sharpen unless Noels actions are doing it. Looking into the actions, Noels does do some guassian blurring, perhaps this is it.

[kniclander]

hey cat, just checked out your chatroom - freaky - did I just speak to a pc?? it's a better conversationalist than I am...

[richardc]

looks good to me!

[Catanonia]

hey cat, just checked out your chatroom - freaky - did I just speak to a pc?? it's a better conversationalist than I am...

Yeah that is Clive the computer conciege to keep you company if noone else is in the room :)

[Catanonia]

Wondering whether to add more data to this or not.

Is it worth it ?

[MartinB]

Thats a very dim target and you have captured it beautifully Mr C

[Sam]

Looks great Cat! nice colour variation:)