NGC 7380 - sh2-142

[glennbech]

Hi!

Great minds think alike I guess, I was entering the NGC designation into the HEQ-5 synscan when I saw Catanonias post of this nebula. Since I have tracking issues with my newt, and no problems what-so-ever with my Megrez90 w/reducer, I decided to go wide-field with this one.

This was a challenge to process, as my darks were too "Hot" (Taken in the shed, I was unsure of the weather...) The hot dark frames caused black spots in my image after stacking. I've done a minimalistic aproach to processing this time. One round of Noel's deep sky noise reduction, and a photoshop noise reducton. Some level & curve adjustments. I also decided to do this black & white. This is only the red channel (the others discarded). I think it's hard to process objects like this with most of the signal in one channel. It's either pink or too dark... well well.

I actually had 21x12 minute darks, over 4 hours, that I cannot use.... Well Well again... I had to recycle 6x12 minutes from another shoot, that was taken outdoors,

and all of a sudden all the spots were gone. I also experimented with all kinds of exotic features in DSS that made my starshapes horrible.

7x720 second light frames. 19 flats. 7 darks. no bias. Clouds stopped me from getting an "all nighter" with it... arg! :-)

The dark nebula left of NGC 7380 is LDN 1200.

High resolution image here

Resized. Full frame of the canon 10D

Cropped.