The Iris Nebula - NGC 7023 - a Westport Astronomcial Photographers group effort (Steven Labkoff & Stuart Stakoff)

This particular reflection nebula has been my "white whale". It's been one of the very hardest deep-space target to get. I've personally photographed it no less than 5 times - and never have gotten a satisfactory image.

Because deep space astrophotography is predicated on getting literally hours of long exposure images and stacking them together, the more time on a given target - even across days or years, matters.

This past Friday Night, Stuart Stakoff, a friend and member of the Westport Astronomical Society decided to go after this Moby Dick of a target. He has a 115mm (about 805mm FL) refractor and a 1.6crop factor camera. He has a better mount than I do - thus he was able to grab 180s frames. The best I've been able to do is 120s frames. He got an additional 39 frames on this tough target.

And frankly, his result was just so-so too.

Last night I decided that perhaps we should pool our data. And Stuart sent me his frames. I combined them with about 4 hours of time on the same target over the past few years... and the result is below. This is about the best shot I've been able to squeeze of the data to date. If we can get even more data, there are brown clouds of dust that are all around this target. In this image, you can just start to make them out.

Total time on this target -

155 light frames:

39 @ 180s

50 @ 45s

66 @ 120s

Sum: About 4.5 hrs of data

Shot on multiple telescopes:

115 mm refractor

92 mm refractor

All frames were calibrated and aligned in PixInsight and finished in photoshop.

Stuart and I are going to try to get even more data on this target and see what we get long-term. This is about 4.5 hrs of integration...

Any of my followers who are crazy enough to shoot this target, if you want to donate some data, we are looking specifically for debayered color frames (if you have to ask what debayered frames are, you probably can't help out). My new goal here is to get over 12 hrs fo data and see what we get...

There are hard targets, and then there are REALLY hard targets... this is in the SUPER-DOOPER hard target class.

Image 1 - 270 min (~4.5 hrs) of integration

Image 2 - 132 min (~2.1 hrs) of integration (for comparison)

Image 3 - 37.5 min (about .6 hrs) of integration (for comparison