Casitas de Gila, Gila, NM, October 9 - 12, 2023

LBN 777 is a portion of the large cloud of dust and gas known as the Taurus Molecular Cloud, the closest to Earth at about 400 light years away.  The brownish color is caused by large dust grains embedded in the gas.  The dust reflects the light of the stars inside and near the nebula.  Barnard 207 is the dark nebula just to the right of the "eye" of the vulture's head.  This is a very faint structure that requires a significant amount of imaging time to bring out the details.

Image processing was somewhat straight forward.  The only issue was balancing the color across the frame since the head and dust clouds were very faint and extensive, iterative stretching with GeneralizedHyperbolicStretch magnified background gradients.  GraXpert was useful, but it could not solve all issues with color in different regions.  I used Photoshop to desaturate areas to make the cloud color more uniform in the faint regions.

Imaging details:

Stellarvue SVX102T refractor with 0.74x focal reducer (FL = 528mm, f/5.2)
ZWO large off-axis guider with a ZWO ASI 174MM mini guide camera
Losmandy G11 mount with Gemini 2
ZWO ASI 2600MM Pro cooled monochrome camera (-10C)
Chroma 36mm Hydrogen-alpha, Luminance, Red, Green, and Blue filters
Equatorial camera rotation: 0 degrees

Software:    Sequence Generator Pro, ASTAP plate solving, PHD2 guiding, 
    Losmandy Gemini ASCOM mount control and web client interface,
    SharpCap Pro for polar alignment with a Polemaster camera,
    PixInsight 1.8.9-2,
    Photoshop 2024

Luminance  2 min x 153 subframes (306 min), Gain 100, Offset 32, 1x1 binning
Red             4 min x 25 subframes (100 min), Gain 100, Offset 32, 1x1 binning
Green          4 min x 23 subframes (92 min), Gain 100, Offset 32, 1x1 binning
Blue            4 min x 24 subframes (96 min), Gain 100, Offset 32, 1x1 binning

Total integration time: 9.9 hours