Pleiades and Friends (James R Potts)

Pleiades and Friends

This was in interesting experiment. I had seen an image of M45 with an emission nebula nearby and I had hoped to capture that. Per my review of Sky Safari I found IC 353 nearby and it was described as a Bright nebula, so I figured that was my emission nebula. Well after almost 14 hours of data, including 5.5 hours of NB images, I determined IC 353 is reflection nebula. I did capture some faint Ha emission in the area, but not what I remember seeing. So after processing this image I did some researching on IC 353 and determined it indeed is a faint reflection nebula. I originally tried this in Jan 2023 using my OSC, but my APP images were terrible, so I kind of abandoned the project. Since M45 is around again, I thought I would add some Mono LRGB and Ha images and try to process using PI.

Even though I did not capture what I had originally intended, I think this turned into a pretty interesting image with lots of things to see. Of note, is PGC 13696 / UGC 2838 is a side on view of a spiral galaxy around 283 million light years away that you can see in Pleiades toward the left. I had never noticed that Galaxy before.

The processing was interesting and time consuming since I used a OSC and a mono camera. On my OSC broadband images, I used APP to separate out the channels in RGB and I used APP to extract the Ha on my OSC NB images. I then stacked the HaLRGB images in APP and processed the Fits in PI.

Pixinsight steps:
GraXpert - all images
FITs Header, all images
Image Solve
LGB Combine RGB images
SPCC - RGB image
BlurX, all images
NoiseX, all images
GH Stretch - RGB, Lum & Ha
LGB Combine - Add Lum
Pixel Math - Add Ha (formula from VisibleDark youtube)
HDRM MT slight adjustments
Local Histogram Equalization, slight sharpening

Some minor Raw Filter touch up in PS.

Suburban Astrophotography
Deep Sky Northern Hemisphere
ZWO ASI2600MM Pro
William Optics GT Series
AstroBin Platform open discussions community forum
The refractors!
ZWO ASIAIR PRO USERS
Texas Astronomy

Nebulas

	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	8780972
PixInsight job	Y6UE4D248NW8KHUFB6NP7T81OIRHNPXQ
PixInsight queue size	n/a
PixInsight stage	TASK_LOG

RA (center)	03h49m20s.52
RA (top/left)	03h45m04s.96
RA (top/right)	03h57m30s.51
RA (bottom/right)	03h53m42s.53
RA (bottom/left)	03h41m10s.98

Dec (center)	+24°36′43″.0
Dec (top/left)	+23°01′13″.6
Dec (top/right)	+24°25′33″.6
Dec (bottom/right)	+26°11′28″.2
Dec (bottom/left)	+24°46′05″.5

Image Index:

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