Witch Head Nebula from Ibaraki, Short Time (Rod Van Meter)

Celestial hemisphere: Southern · Constellation: Eridanus (Eri) · Contains: NGC 1909 · The star Rigel (βOri) · The star λEri · The star ψEri · the Witch Head Nebula

Witch Head Nebula from Ibaraki, Short Time, Rod Van Meter

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Witch Head Nebula from Ibaraki, Short Time

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Witch Head Nebula from Ibaraki, Short Time

This image has a long story. A long-planned trip to a good dark site got rained out at the last minute, resulting in an additional three-hour drive to a hole in the clouds that wasn't as dark as the original -- and we had haze, and got finally clouded out around 2am, after only an hour of data on this target. Around 50 minutes of that proved to be usable, and selection of subs reduced that to about 40 minutes.

Tracking problems meant I was limited to 15 second subs; I'm hoping to add an autoguider that will allow substantially longer ones, but at the moment my tracker seems to be running about 3% slow and I haven't been able to fix that yet.

So, I ended up with 155 15-second subs stacked, and still very little signal; SNR of about 2 in APP (though I don't know how they calculate that). In learning how to handle this, I wound up making huge strides in my understanding of APP's light pollution removal and background calibration in general. There is still a lot I don't know about all of the APP bells and whistles, but in the end, after a final stretch and crop in GIMP, I think this is about all that this data has to give.

I knew this target was a stretch for both my current skill level and the weather/sky conditions, so I treat this one as a learning experience, not a final image for this target. I'm now hooked on this target, though, so I hope to produce something better over the winter sometime!

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	Distinct awarded users	Total awarded images
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	Image of the day	Top pick	Top pick nominations	Total submitted
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	Image of the day	Top pick	Top pick nominations	Total submitted
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The “AstroBin Image of the Day and Top Picks”, or IOTD/TP, is a long-running system to promote beautiful, interesting, peculiar, or otherwise amazing astrophotographs, with a focus on technical excellence. Learn more.

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Status	Basic success
Started	...
Astrometry.net job	5207289
PixInsight job	n/a
PixInsight queue size	n/a
PixInsight stage	n/a

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Witch Head Nebula from Ibaraki, Short Time

Witch Head Nebula from Ibaraki, Short Time

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Witch Head Nebula from Ibaraki, Short Time

Witch Head Nebula from Ibaraki, Short Time

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