Two nights and a few hours (before the clouds moved in) of (for Berlin suburbia) very good conditions (sky brightness of 19.8 and seeing below 2") allowed me a first go on this beautiful emission/reflection nebula in the constellation Cygnus. IC5146 is considered to be a prototype of a stellar nursery, and the embedded open cluster Collinder 470 has an estimated age of only a couple of hundred thousand years. IC5146 is located at the end of the dark nebula Barnard 168. West of IC5146 is the reflection nebula van den Bergh 147.
First level data reduction was fairly straight forward, colors in this object are so strong that there was no need to boost saturation in any way (except for the blue reflection nebula), for IC5146 I actually had to desaturate it a bit. Main task was to separate the bluish/white and the red parts of the nebula, otherwise one only get a big red wash. As so often, GHS ny
@David Payne and
@Mike Cranfield was an extremely valuable tool for acomplishing this
Data were taken on Aug 9, 10 and 11
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