Abell 78 #1 (Molly Wakeling)

Abell 78 #1

One last image to round out 2023!
This planetary nebula is located in the summertime constellation Cygnus, and lies about 5,000 lightyears from Earth. This colorful husk of a dying star has an outer halo that is less faint than that of the Ring Nebula, and came out quite readily when I processed this image. The outer halo consists primarily of hydrogen (the red gas here), although you can see a decent bit of oxygen (the blue-green) as well. While in this image, the central core looks mainly of oxygen, it actually primarily consists of helium, which does have emission lines in the visible spectrum, but because its ionization energy is much higher than most elements, it is not often energized enough to glow in many nebulae.

I used the Optolong L-Ultimate filter for this, and I only tweaked the colors a little bit for aesthetic purposes. The red hydrogen came out unusually red in this image -- usually it's a lot more pink. I bumped it up a bit to showcase it because it's cool. I'm also really happy with the detail that the deconvolution tool BlurXterminator got back from it. I love shooting with the nice long juicy focal length of my 9.25 Edge HD at f/10, but alas, the images come out **so dim** that PixInsight cannot plate solve the unstretched image and this time, even SubframeSelector struggled to properly detect the stars -- I wound up having to go through them myself (after the initial pass I do on them the morning after the subframes are taken). When using GeneralisedHyperbolicStretch, I have to zoom in *750 times* in order to see enough of the histogram to set the symmetry point. I've still got several datasets taken this year to process, but when I get it set back up at my new house, I will be putting the 0.7x focal reducer back on. It was fun to try!

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Status	Advanced success
Started	...
Astrometry.net job	8981129
PixInsight job	ETZNWVJHTJQ59KKZ1SIO9RV5MH81BCSB
PixInsight queue size	n/a
PixInsight stage	TASK_LOG

RA (center)	21h35m29s.133
RA (top/left)	21h35m55s.899
RA (top/right)	21h36m13s.816
RA (bottom/right)	21h35m02s.181
RA (bottom/left)	21h34m44s.526

Dec (center)	+31°41′43″.51
Dec (top/left)	+31°29′42″.67
Dec (top/right)	+31°51′01″.50
Dec (bottom/right)	+31°53′43″.81
Dec (bottom/left)	+31°32′23″.86

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Abell 78 #1

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