BARNARD 150 - THE SEAHORSE NEBULAThis past fall I spent nearly 30 hours imaging this glorious dark nebula from my private observatory. Dark nebulae like this one are very difficult to capture. They need extremely dark skies to really bring out the dust surrounding them. Only recently was I able to process all of the data captured on it.
Barnard 150, also known as the Seahorse Nebula is a dark molecular cloud of dust in Cepheus constellation, so thick, that it absorbs all the light that comes from the stars behind it. This molecular cloud is part of our Milky Way galaxy, with a distance of about 1200 Light Years away. Cloud location on the Milky Way's plane, makes it stand out on the background completely filled with colorful stars of any age and size.
Due to all of the light emitted from these stars, the distinctive, serpent like shape of this molecular cloud can be observed. And with rotation of the image by 90 degrees, one can easily recognize why this cloud inherent a second name of "Seahorse Nebula". This nebula is about 1 degree in size, width of two Moons.
OTA: Sharpstar SCA260
Mount: iOptron CEM120
Camera: ZWO ASI2600MM Pro
Gain: 100
Cooling Temperature: -10 degrees celsius
Filters:
Chroma Luminance⚪ 300s x 95 = 8 hrs
Chroma Red🔴 300s x 82 = 6.8 hrs
Chroma Green🟢 300s x 79 = 6.6 hrs
Chroma Blue🔵 300s x 79 = 6.6 hrs
28 hours total acquisition time
Auto-guiding: ZWO ASI174MM Mini and ZWO OAG-L
Auto-focusing: ZWO EAF
Control: ZWO ASIAIR Pro
Calibrated in Astro Pixel Processor with flats, darks and dark flats. Processed in Pixinsight.
Imaged from Flagstaff, Arizona in class 2 Bortle skies.
https://NAZObservatory.com 
Comments