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SH2-129 Flying Bat and OU-4 Squid Nebulae with RGB stars, fermion
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SH2-129 Flying Bat and OU-4 Squid Nebulae with RGB stars

SH2-129 Flying Bat and OU-4 Squid Nebulae with RGB stars, fermion
Powered byPixInsight

SH2-129 Flying Bat and OU-4 Squid Nebulae with RGB stars

Equipment

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Acquisition details

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Description

Two years into the hobby, I decided to take on the challenge. This is by far the most demanding project for me. I knew the squid is an extremely faint emission nebula before started. However, it's more difficult than I expected. It was hard to get enough photons in a single 10 min sub using a f/5.3 scope and under Bortle 5/6 skies. The weather in Northern California was almost perfect in the past 20 days or so. Cloud coverage was constantly around or below 6-8%, the worst being 12-15%. 

Apart from a guiding issue I still need to sort out, imaging went smoothly. Processing the data, however, is another story. For my setup, the signal for the squid is not much above the background noise level. Stretching the squid without blowing up the noise was really pushing my processing skills to the limit. I ended up using a mask in order to suppress the noise in the nonlinear stage. All in all, this was a wonderful journey.

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SH2-129 Flying Bat and OU-4 Squid Nebulae with RGB stars, fermion