This is a revisit from one of my first ventures into astrophotography a couple of years ago. Though not first light with my new camera, it is my second serious effort to get an image, with the intent of getting the image for the image's sake with this camera. (Well, I have recorded a few others, but this one was the easiest and fastest to process.) If anyone is interested, they can go back and look at my first effort at this target. For both, I was somewhat starved for subs. But this is a fairly bright nebula and I think I got enough and not likely to revisit this anytime soon. Simply a casualty of the weather where I live.

Named for the bright star surrounded by reflection nebulae and more broadly the fainter Ha emission nebula, to me this actually looks more like a well cooked cocktail shrimp! I tried to process this in real color (using photometric color calibration). In my subs, the bluish reflection nebula filaments appear to be largely detached from and float above the red emission nebula and close to the illuminating star. This makes sense, I guess. However, the dust in the reflection nebula is very diffuse and transparent, allowing significant red light to pass through from behind. This yields a rather greyish appearance, which has purple overtones. My stretching (both red and blue) makes these fields of dust look purple. Otherwise, the features of this nebula are much more subdued than many of the other more popular nebulae. To help viewers see that structure better, I have employed a decent amount of star reduction here. I used primarily the Adam Bloch technique. Often star reduction is more strongly employed, but instead I include a starless representation as a revision that I think favors this nebula.

So far I am happy with the new camera. I include still another revision showing the bright star artifacts seen with the old camera and the new. The old yielded the not uncommon circular halo with the same imaging train. The new one has little or no halo, however you can see a lot of diffraction spikes. This is not the camera (at least I hope not!). Rather, upon storage of my RASA over the last long 5 months, apparently a small spider got busy just behind the corrector plate. These are invisible unless viewed at night with a headlamp. In any case, a new take on how a spider can add diffraction spikes to bright stars! I will be posting on Cloudy Nights or someother to see if anyone has any ideas as to how to remove those damn webs. Help!

Additional acquisition info: The QHY268c has multiple acquisition/read modes. For this, I used Mode 3 @ gain 0 with an offset of 8. I am learning that offset 8 is likely bare bones and other targets that I have used this offset with, but with shorter exposures, are giving me headaches with periodic noise in my background. Looks like fine horizontal raster lines from an old analog tv. I am trying to figure out why my bias will not remove that, but... No such issues with this target"s 300s exposures. Lots to learn.