IC1318 - A butterfly in chaos (Terri)

IC1318 - A butterfly in chaos

I shot IC1318 from my backyard in Vermont. I've used a Stowaway with focal reducer to capture the area along with an ASI6200MM camera with both broadband and narrowband Chroma filters. The narrowband filters are 3nm. The total integration time is 11 hours with 9.5 hours in SHO and 30 minutes each in R G and B for the stars. I minimized the stars significantly as I find them distracting in the image, where the real focus is the bright and dark nebulosity in the area, as well as the fact that I have a back-spacing issue that makes the stars very ugly in the corners, so I used a radial gradient to keep a few stars in the middle but eliminate them entirely as you came to the edges of the frame. I hope the result is ok. I find all of the detail in the nebula very interesting. I also have B&W version and think that color is almost too distracting, but it does provide some 3 dimensional experience so I leave it.

I captured the images on an Astro-Physics 1100GTO mount with encoders. I used APCC to create a DEC ARC model each night I imaged, and then captured all images unguided. The narrow band frames were all 15 minutes long while the R,G and B were either 4 or 3 minutes each. I now prefer to use modeling over guiding as there are fewer issues and nothing to constantly keep an eye on.

Being originally from the midwest, it kind of reminds me of the turbulent skies we could get in the summertime, where the skies turned shades of grey/blue/green and churned wildly as the tornado sirens were blaring.

Original
B
C
Final
D

C

Description: Provided a bit more contrast, eliminated stars entirely

Uploaded: ...

D

Description: added a little sharpening.. i hope not too much

Uploaded: ...

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Backyard
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Unknown

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