Lower's Nebula (George Simon)

Lower's Nebula

In the 1930s, Harold Lower and his son Charles, amateur astronomers and skilled telescope makers, constructed an 8-inch f/1 Schmidt camera. In an article he published in 1939 in the journal of the Astronomical Society of the Pacific, Harold reported that by utilizing red-sensitive film and a deep-red filter, he and Charles had encountered considerable success in imaging dim emission nebulae. Among these objects was a previously unknown nebula in Orion which decades later was given the catalogue designation Sh2-261. In honor of its discoverers, this nebula is commonly known as Lower's Nebula. (I have also seen it called the Big Brain Nebula, a rather apt alternative name, I think.)

Sh2-261 is rather infrequently imaged, which is understandable given its low surface brightness and its immersion in a very dense star field. I found this image incredibly difficult to process, not only because of the target's aforementioned characteristics, but also because of the horrible seeing that held sway on the night I collected the data for the image. The latter forced me to use software binning to increase the image scale by a factor of four. Despite the decreased resolution, I still managed to resolve a fair amount of detail in the nebula, especially in the hollowed-out, central region.

Original
B
C
D
Final
E

B

Description: I eliminated some residual color noise in the dimmer parts of the image.

Uploaded: ...

C

Description: Reprocessed from scratch. For this iteration, I used a different algorithm in GraXpert, and stretched the starless image in Siril rather than in StarTools (whose stretching modules struggle with starless images). To my eye, this is a better rendition than the previous versions.

Uploaded: ...

D

Description: A slight tweak to the nebula color, and a tiny bit of sharpening to the detail at the bottom of the nebula.

Uploaded: ...

E

Description: A final (hopefully) tweak to the color balance.

Uploaded: ...

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Status	Basic success
Started	...
Astrometry.net job	9114689
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