NGC 2174 - The Monkey Playing in Dust Nebula - 68 Hours - LRGBHSO (Brian Puhl)

NGC 2174 - The Monkey Playing in Dust Nebula - 68 Hours - LRGBHSO

First ambitious project utilizing TWO completely independent Esprit 100 setups, one of them using my QHY 268M, the other using the OGMA AP26MC. Both are riding on EQ6R Pros with Antlia 3nm filters. The thing I didn't realize is how easy it is to get carried away with how much data you can acquire in such a short period. With both scopes working together on a target, I can get over 20 hours in a single night.   Before I knew it, I had over 70 hours of data. Due to some intial reflection issues I had, and some clouds, I rejected probably 5+ hours of luminance data, leaving me around 68 hours in total. The ultimate bummer with this image however, is that Monkey is a rather bright nebula.   LRGB data was strong enough that the SHO data had very little effect in the final image. Unfortunately it added very little detail, however it did end up providing enough signal to make an completely noiseless composition of the emission data.

The challenge of this image is realizing just how much dust there actually was here.   The entire area is covered in it....   so much that I had to pick and choose which parts I wanted to accentuate, or the image would just be a fog of dust.   The bottom left is my favorite part of the whole framing. This area is cataloged as Dobashi 4581. Very interesting structures that honestly appear like the arms of an emission nebula, but it's pure dust. They are better pronounced when you view the starless version by hovering over the image.    I may try to revisit this exact spot next season and go to town on a much longer project.

Overall, all the data is integrated into this image using my normal LRGBHSO technique, but the reality is I only needed the LRGB to achieve the same results. Lessons learned, but a still a quality image I'm happy with.    Hope you enjoy!

Final
Original
B

B

Title: Starless

Uploaded: ...

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Status	Advanced success
Started	...
Astrometry.net job	8921412
PixInsight job	WSUVUH383TIBYC8JZADP98X68FYPXUSJ
PixInsight queue size	n/a
PixInsight stage	TASK_LOG

RA (center)	06h09m46s.44
RA (top/left)	06h06m23s.48
RA (top/right)	06h06m38s.91
RA (bottom/right)	06h13m06s.66
RA (bottom/left)	06h12m56s.75

Dec (center)	+20°48′33″.7
Dec (top/left)	+21°57′41″.4
Dec (top/right)	+19°37′11″.5
Dec (bottom/right)	+19°39′04″.9
Dec (bottom/left)	+21°59′35″.6

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