Celestial hemisphere:  Northern  ·  Constellation: Cygnus (Cyg)  ·  Contains:  56 Cyg  ·  57 Cyg  ·  IC 5070  ·  Pelican nebula  ·  The star 56Cyg  ·  The star 57Cyg
IC-5067 (Pelican Nebula), Joel Shepherd
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IC-5067 (Pelican Nebula)

IC-5067 (Pelican Nebula), Joel Shepherd
Powered byPixInsight

IC-5067 (Pelican Nebula)

Equipment

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Acquisition details

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Description

This was an amazing target in terms of the immensely strong signal of blue-ish area: at times I felt like I was working with plaster or paint, and not whisps of emitted photons. It proved to be very challenging though too. At the time, I was wrestling with guiding challenges, which I finally tracked down to the guide camera wiggling ever so slightly, only after ruling out practically every other cause. Auto-focus was (and continues to be) an imperfect science. A few of my flats were dubious, and so on. In processing, I ended up making four major efforts on it before finally getting to colors and intensity that I felt good about ... and still haven't figured out how to satisfactorily integrate a couple hours of RGB star data.

My friend @BrianSweeney suggested the target, and we also have some O-iii data that he collected from Phoenix (not used in this version). It was our first attempt at collaboration and one lesson learned was ... camera rotation matters! :-) So we may be shopping for rotators.

tl;dr: Surprisingly challenging all along the way, but worth the effort in the end.

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Sky plot

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IC-5067 (Pelican Nebula), Joel Shepherd