NGC 7293, The Helix Nebula, is another image resulting from the trove of data collected during the incredible stretch of weather we just had in western NY November 5-8, 2021.
This image was shot with my Astro-Physics 130mm Telescope Platform with the IOptron CEM60 and the ASI2600MM-Prop Camera. a little more than 4.5 hours of LRGB and Ha data was captured.
This is a really tough image for me to capture as it rides very low in the sky here, and it is positioned such that I can only get about 90 minutes on target each night due to the trees on my property. Because of these challenges and others, I knew this would be a data set that was plagued with many issues and so I put off working on this while the others collected at the same time were processed first.
As I dug into the data further, I found even more problems, some due to clouds and conditions, some due to SAM (Stupid Astrophotographers Mistakes).
So I really had to work on my Pixinsight skills to get something useful out of this image. I am not at all thrilled with the final result - while it is marginally better than an earlier effort I made on this target, it fell well short of what I was really shooting for. But - I share all of my images, good and bad on my website because that part of the Journey and perhaps there is learnings that can be made from each.
The story of the image and its processing can be seen on my website at:
https://cosgrovescosmos.com/projects/ngc7293-helix-nebula-lhargbThanks for looking! Let me know if you have any questions.
Pat
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