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SH2-132 | Bortle 7 Narrowband Mix, Kevin Morefield

SH2-132 | Bortle 7 Narrowband Mix

Getting plate-solving status, please wait...
SH2-132 | Bortle 7 Narrowband Mix, Kevin Morefield

SH2-132 | Bortle 7 Narrowband Mix

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Description

This Nebula surprised me with it's complexity and colors.  It is composed of shells - there appear to be 3 or 4 to me though the data I found online seem to refer to shell A and B only.  Those papers are pretty old at this point and I wasn't able to match up the old data with mine enough to see which of the shells they refer too.

In addition to SH2-132 there are several planetary nebula.  PK 102.02.1 in the upper right corner is really fascinating and I may try to shoot it with my long FL scope.  It appears to me as a bi-polar hourglass seen at an angle of maybe 35 degrees.  The colorful ring looks like an intersection of the two sides, something like we see in the Helix.  

The data was captured from my Bortle 7 backyard.   The narrowband mix is a dynamic blend of SHO where S is used for Red in places where O is weak, and H is used for Red in places where O is strong.  Green is a mix of S+H where O is strong and O where O is weak.  This produces a really nice subtle range of colors that do a great job of separating out areas with different mixes of the three wavelengths.  It's also often a pleasing color mix.  

RW Cepheus is also in view, a bright red star near the center.  This is a hyper-giant variable star - one of the largest stars known.  It is 1000 times the size of the Sun and thus larger than the orbit of Jupiter.  Visual magnitude ranges from 6 to 7.3.

The stars are also a dynamic SHO mix but were blended after being separated using StarXterminator.  After stretching the stars with ArcSinh, I added them back in Photoshop using a Screen layer.  The stars themselves were used as a mask over the screened stars.  Adjusting the levels of the Mask enabled me to dial in the star sizes.

NoiseXterminator was used with some masking to prevent the full force of NR on the highlights.  However, Russell's product is very gentle on details so I don't need to mask highlights nearly as much as with other NR products.

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