This image is the culmination of a month's work between
@Brian Puhl and myself. Throughout the new moon we gathered just over 134 hours of data using three nearly identical scopes, one of which in the Southeast Arizona desert (Bortle 1) and the other two of which in Rural North Carolina (Bortle 4). Both of us have fallen in love with the Esprit 100ed for its sharpness and speed which made it perfect for such a delicate and faint target. Sharpless 224 was one of the first faint objects I ever attempted to image, now nearly three years later I am ecstatic to have been able to get another attempt under my belt. In my first attempt, I was incredibly excited just to see the nebulosity of the supernova remnant, but this time around I decided to explore a bit and put some time into luminance. To my surprise, I found that there is a striking amount of faint, rarely seen, IFN-like dust in the background, making the image all the more dynamic.
This image was certainly not without its challenges though. As this target is in a very dense star region, it was very difficult to control the intensity of the stars in the process. Using my
Independent starless processing technique, as well as multiscale processing on the star layer, I was able to reduce the intensity without compromising the aesthetics of the stars. I hope you all enjoy the image!
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