Horsehead and Barnard's Loop in H-alpha (Dan)

Horsehead and Barnard's Loop in H-alpha

I'm pleasantly surprised with how this image turned out. Acquisition was kind of disastrous with my meridian flip failing while I was asleep, causing me to lose 2.4 hours of data. The amazing f/1.4 Sigma Art lens pulled through and delivered a stunning image despite the short integration time.

This image was taken entirely from my Bortle 8 backyard surrounded by streetlights and neighbors' LEDs. The IDAS UHS filter looks to be a performer. At 6.8nm I was not confident it would do a good enough job from my backyard, but it delivered big time. I'll definitely be using it with confidence.

I also tried a new (to me, and to many, I think) technique here: stepping the lens down to shoot a small subset of data to be used to layer stars into the final image. The Astromechanics EOS lens controller allowed me to do this easily (though the controller doesn't work perfectly with the lens) in combination with StarXTerminator. I simply stretched the two data sets separately, removed the stars from both while keeping the separated stars from the steppe-down image, and then screened the stepped-down, stretched stars onto the f/1.4 stretched image. This works almost perfectly, but if you zoom in on some of the corners you'll be able to see "shadows" of the distorted f/1.4 stars. For now, I'm fine with this as it's something that would only be noticed by zooming in 1:1, which makes no sense for an ultra-wide image like this. In the future I may look into a way to avoid it. I should also note that StarXTerminator was only able to remove all the stars from the f/1.4 image after application of BlurXTerminator in "Correct Only" mode.

I did not run BXT on the nebula; when I did, it only sharpened the Flame and some of B33, giving an artificial look that I didn't like. I suspect BXT may be fairly useless for ultra-wide images like this when proper star management has been done through the above-described method.

Finally, GraxpertAI did an excellent job removing the gradients from both images, which were fairly severe given my location and the low altitude of this target.

Camera Lens Astrophotography

	Distinct awarded users	Total awarded images
Image of the day
Top picks
Top pick nominations

	Image of the day	Top pick	Top pick nominations	Total submitted
Deep sky
Solar system
Extremely wide field
Star trails
Northern lights
Noctilucent clouds
Landscape

	Image of the day	Top pick	Top pick nominations	Total submitted
Backyard
Traveller
Own remote observatory
Amateur hosting facility
Public amaeteur data
Professional, scientific grade data
Mix of multiple sources
Other
Unknown

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Status	Advanced success
Started	...
Astrometry.net job	8787773
PixInsight job	AWBD2SWBAJNOAIVUVUH2ND2RHVOQ6A3W
PixInsight queue size	n/a
PixInsight stage	TASK_LOG

RA (center)	05h42m30s.37
RA (top/left)	05h16m26s.47
RA (top/right)	05h15m54s.70
RA (bottom/right)	06h08m37s.52
RA (bottom/left)	06h09m07s.67

Dec (center)	+00°08′07″.4
Dec (top/left)	+04°36′19″.6
Dec (top/right)	-04°08′58″.7
Dec (bottom/right)	-04°20′49″.6
Dec (bottom/left)	+04°24′52″.5

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