Cocoon Nebula

[mark7331]

The first time I've actually seen this one with my own eyes. Taken last night as it was the best positioned object I could find. The seeing was poor and there was so much moisture in the atmosphere the equipment was dripping water everywhere. I'm going to add more (of course) but this was taken with a collection of 5 minute subs. The guiding was struggling with the conditions, probably due to my inexperience, so 5 minutes was the most stable I could get. I think I probably need to go for 8min or up. Any insights would be very welcome.

I stopped and restarted as the scope went through the merdian because last time I didn't it hit the tripod leg! So Luminance was only 9 subs. You can just make out the meteor trail - which I kept because I didn't really have enough of the Lum subs.

Luminance: 9 x 5min

R,G & B: 12 x 5min each

Combined & processed in PixInsight.

I appreciate all comments.

Thanks for looking

Mark

[madjohn]

Nice bright image Mark, Funny how it looks far redder in other images, myself included.

Great close up, lots of structure there.

Well done.

John

[mark7331]

Thanks John. Yes I was wondering about the color. I used the same amount of data for each channel. I've done a reprocess here with RGB at 1:0.7:1 and it appears more red.

I'd like to know what's going on and how you know what colour weights to use. I guess that comes from experience?

[johnh]

You've picked up a lot of dust and colour in reprocess is better, cocoon should be red with blue halo around it. Star colours pretty good too, second image is a bit noisy but better colour. Colour is always subjective but good start with this object.

John.

[mark7331]

Thanks both John & John.

After some applying my head to the bashing wall I started again. I've worked out where I was loosing the colour balance. I'm using AstroArt to collect images & darks and it saves them in 16 bit format. Unless I batch convert all files into 32 bit IEEE format before processing I loose a lot of signal.

So here we go.