NGC 225 & VDB4 (rhedden)

NGC 225 & VDB4

NGC 225 is the Sailboat Cluster in Cassiopeia, and VDB4 is a faint reflection nebula with finger-like projections nearby.

This image started off as a plan to shoot a faint, dusty subject entirely from my Bortle-2 dark site. After taking over 5 hours of data on a night with excellent seeing and transparency, but a little too much dew, I was horrified to find a large, nearly circular dome of light sitting just about on top of the target. It was a ghost reflection from the bright star Navi. I don't know how I let something like that escape my attention while I was at the dark site, as I always stretch some subs as the data are coming out. I only got three trips to the dark site this year, so spending one of them collective defective subs was a slap in the face.

I had to shoot more luminance frames at home with the target about 40% off center, which moved the reflection away from the target. Combining the two luminance stacks allowed me to eliminate the ghost reflection, thankfully. The processing workflow involved was really tedious, and it's too much to describe here, but I salvaged the image after many hours of toiling.

The H-alpha emissions in this image are exaggerated a bit. The H-alpha was incredibly faint, so it's stretched out of proportion to the other nebulosity in the image.

Overall, this image is not as good as the last few I posted, but I am glad to have a presentable image of this subject after the way the project started. I think the stars are stretched a little too aggressively, but I don't want to go back and re-process this one right now. Perhaps in the middle of the winter when I have no data to process, I can revisit this project.

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Status	Basic success
Started	...
Astrometry.net job	5113153
PixInsight job	n/a
PixInsight queue size	n/a
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NGC 225 & VDB4

NGC 225 & VDB4

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