Rho Ophiuchi 135mm (Martin Palenik)

Celestial hemisphere: Southern · Constellation: Scorpius (Sco) · Contains: IC 4603 · IC 4604 · IC 4605 · M 4 · M 80 · NGC 6093 · NGC 6121 · NGC 6144 · Part of the constellation Scorpius (Sco) · The star 22Sco · The star Al Niyat (σSco) · The star Antares (αSco) · The star οSco · The star ρOph · The star τSco · The star ωOph · rho Oph nebula

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Rho Ophiuchi 135mm

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Rho Ophiuchi 135mm

On April 21, 2018, I was lucky to visit one of the darkest skies available in Ontario. It was my full intention to image Rho. This is such a difficult target for us due to the short time it is rising, and later during the year it can start to drop when it gets dark enough. Let alone the weather and moon phases.. So timing is everything searching for Rho.

I had planned for 1 hour on each channel.. Well that did not happen, lol. I'm not sure if imaging low was a problem or something with the seeing but I was having very bad guiding early on so I really had to loosen the PHD threshold for settling to avoid losing precious time. It was beautiful just to look at, let alone image. I could see the entire scorpio beautifully.

I shot with 0 gain as I wanted as much dynamic range as possible. This is one of my first RGB images taken. Unfortunately I had horrible halos in my stars, but thanks to David Ault's halo tutorial I was able to manage them but it quickly made me reconsider these filters for future. Antares is very bright so I am sure that had a part to play.

I was really hoping the dark skies would have paid off due to the short imaging time, I was really shocked at the data, this was the darkest skies I've been to and the first time looking at data such as this, so I was pleasently surprised. It really puts to perspective some of the other data I've seen and how true dark skies really make the difference.

Imaging Rho is something special I find, perhaps a colour camera would be more optimal in future, but it is definitely a challenge.

Though I had little data I believe the dark skies helped achieve my goal and I am happy to share the results. Thanks for viewing!

Cloudy Nights

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