NGC 7293, The Helix Nebula (Bob Rucker)

NGC 7293, The Helix Nebula

Last night I headed out to the Picket Post Mountain Trailhead with the gang for some dark sky imaging. I decided to take a break from my current 8 pane mosaic project and image the Helix Nebula. The amount of data collected was far short of what I hoped for on account of some technical challenges. My ASIAIR Plus was misbehaving and dropping the connection and freezing. Luckily elmiko was there to offer some out of the box troubleshooting ideas and the problem was finally identified as a bad flash drive. Once the offending device was removed, my ASIAIR performed like a champ when writing to the onboard EMMC memory. Special thanks to Mike for saving my session.

This is my first published image since acquiring the Sky-Watcher 0.85 reducer/flattener. I think my backspacing needs a bit more tweaking but the stars are much better than anything I achieved with the Hotech flattener. Hopefulley the Sky-Watcher rotator that is designed specifically for this scope will be delivered soon as well.

This target is not visible from my backyard so it was fun to image it. One of these days I hope to add some more data to do it justice. Oh well, back to my mosaic project...

Original
B
C
Final
D

B

Description: Reprocessed to coax out more details on the hydrogen shell. Hopefully I can get more data at some point to soften things a bit as this probably over stretched my limited data by quite a bit.

Uploaded: ...

C

Description: One more revision. The stretch on the last revision to better define the outer Ha shell resulted in a red tint to the background. This revision backed down the Ha stretch a bit and then the nebula was masked so that the background could be tamed a bit more.

Uploaded: ...

D

Description: Slight adjustment to blending and saturation.

Uploaded: ...

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Status	Advanced success
Started	...
Astrometry.net job	6486934
PixInsight job	5HS08XXPD5JTKMTA2KEGO8XN8BKUC56Y
PixInsight queue size	n/a
PixInsight stage	TASK_LOG

RA (center)	22h29m45s.837
RA (top/left)	22h28m57s.986
RA (top/right)	22h34m24s.838
RA (bottom/right)	22h30m33s.277
RA (bottom/left)	22h25m05s.107

Dec (center)	-20°49′50″.14
Dec (top/left)	-21°57′28″.13
Dec (top/right)	-20°28′31″.40
Dec (bottom/right)	-19°42′17″.18
Dec (bottom/left)	-21°10′48″.74

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