NGC 6543, Cat's Eye Nebula (David Dearden)

Celestial hemisphere: Northern · Constellation: Draco (Dra) · Contains: IC 4677 · NGC 6543 · NGC 6552 · PK096+29.1

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NGC 6543, Cat's Eye Nebula

Found the Cat's Eye visually by matching the ocular field in Stellarium to what I was seeing in the camera. The nebula and the "next door" star, plus another fairly bright star to the northeast (above left in my view) were what I keyed on. At least initially, conditions are superb except for a few high clouds. Getting excellent guiding performance tonight. I'm balanced east-heavy for sure and guiding Dec north only. Cooler is at 15 °C. Excellent guiding conditions with little wind for most of this run. Processed pretty extensively to get this image and particularly to make the outer halo show up. I consider this one of the more difficult objects I've tried to capture so far.

Date: 6 Aug 2012

Subject: NGC 6543, Cat's Eye Nebula

Scope: AT8IN

Filter: none

Mount: CG-5 (Synta motors)

Guiding: Orion ST80 + 0.5x Antares telereducer + DSI Ic + PHD

Camera: DSI IIc

Acquisition: Nebulosity 3.1.0

Exposure: 29x300 s + 5x60s (core)

Stacking: Neb 3, bias included, normalize first, trans+rot align, 1.5 SD stack

Processing: crop, color balance, levels & curves, GreyCStoration in N3. Astronomy Tools color blotch, deep space, space noise reduction, levels to darken; layer mask an un-darkened hide-all layer on top with Gaussian blur; flatten & saturation boost all in CS5. Also, AT "enhance DSO & reduce stars" & more saturation boost.

Final
Original
B

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Status	Advanced success
Started	...
Astrometry.net job	279128
PixInsight job	LLG2R2JUK9VZXX9KAKWPO924YFJ46SJ0
PixInsight queue size	n/a
PixInsight stage	n/a

RA (center)	17h58m41s.54
RA (top/left)	18h01m07s.47
RA (top/right)	17h56m24s.98
RA (bottom/right)	17h56m17s.43
RA (bottom/left)	18h00m54s.84

Dec (center)	+66°36′53″.4
Dec (top/left)	+66°47′36″.6
Dec (top/right)	+66°48′46″.8
Dec (bottom/right)	+66°26′02″.3
Dec (bottom/left)	+66°24′51″.5

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