This is a rich region in the Cygnus constellation around the beautiful and rare Wolf-Rayet star WR-134.  Located around 6,000 light years away from Earth, it is surrounded by a faint bubble nebula of ionized gas blown by the intense radiation and fast wind from the star.  It is five times the radius of the sun, but due to a temperature over 63,000K it is 400,000 times as luminous as the Sun.   WR-134 lies in an area of ionized Hydrogen and Sulfur which emits a beautiful red glow.  Also on the right side of the image is the small open star cluster NGC6871.

To resolve the faint O3 emission, I focused the bulk of my imaging time on the O3 channel.  After playing around with a basic SHO pallet (original version), I elected to blend the data in a way to come close to a more natural color pallet utilizing both Ha and S2 data in the red channel and to a smaller extent in the green channel.

This image started as an early Cygnus season narrow band project that I could shoot between broadband projects while the moon was out.  It turned into a frustrating marathon session full of equipment tinkering and gremlin chasing. 

Since installing my TOA-150 at Sierra Remote Observatory, I have been fighting some flexure and tilt issues that have been getting progressively worse.  By all accounts, this should be a very rigid rig with the TAK refractor and 10Micron GM2000 mount.    But something was shifting both in the imaging train and on the rig itself and performance was getting worse.  I was losing subs and struggling to guide.  (I had completely given up on unguided already.)  I had originally built the rig with PrimaLuce OTA rings and one of my suspicions was that the heavy OTA was just too much for them.  The connection between the dove tail and rings is also rather flimsy and the rings are very light weight.  It was just enough to cause some flexing that I was not able to model out.

In addition, something in the imaging train was loose and tilt was increasing.  By the time I got around to shooting the RGB data, the tilt was so bad that the data was not usable.   So, in the middle of the project I flew out to California to rebuild the rig using the much more substantial TAK rings that are made for this OTA and to trouble shoot the tilt issue.  I found a loose connection between the OTA and the adapter for the ESSATO focuser which definitely caused the tilt problem.    The tilt is now much better, though not yet perfect as I ran out of time on site.  Once it was all back together with the new rings, I rebuilt the sky model and confirmed the flexure was also solved.    I also installed a PrimaLuce ECCO weather station to provide real time atmospheric pressure and temp data to the 10Micron so that it would accurately correct for atmospheric refraction and further improve guideing and pointing accuracy.  I now am now able to image unguided, although for now I am still using the guider with long guide camera exposure times to fine tune the performance.

I am much closer to a perfect rig, one more trip out West later this summer to fight with the wonky ZWO tilt plate and I will be there!

Thanks for stopping by.