M78 - an impressive target seen from the city of Sofia (Ivan Raichev)

Celestial hemisphere: Northern · Constellation: Orion (Ori) · Contains: M 78 · NGC 2064 · NGC 2067 · NGC 2068 · NGC 2071

M78 - an impressive target seen from the city of Sofia, Ivan Raichev

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M78 - an impressive target seen from the city of Sofia

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M78 - an impressive target seen from the city of Sofia

I can only say one thing - WOW. This target is unreal! I imaged M78 last winter with my C6. I saw Casper the friendly ghost and was very pleased. This year I decided to try M78 with my bigger scope. I centered on Casper and started to acquire data. Then I stacked the first nigh and liked what I saw and decided to gather more light. However being already in February I felt that I am a bit late for this target. At my location it rises at dawn and sets below 30 degrees at about 11 pm. And considering that this winter the weather here is quite unstable - I began to be sorry for myself that I will have to wait till next winter to finish this project.

However I got lucky and managed to steal a total of 3 nights and a half. In Sofia M78 rises to about 47 degrees at the meridian and seeing is not so good there. Actually M78 is right at the celestial equator. This target turned out to be the perfect test for my new mount. The gathered experience showed that guiding is quite dependent on seeing. At some moment in time I got RMS error above 1.3" and at another - 0.47".

After the mere stack of my exposures there wasn't much detail. I got a lot of gradients and stuff. But when I removed them - well then the beauty of this object shined. I am impressed by the cloud formations and I am happy with the achieved result.

Original
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Final
C

B

Description: Starless version of M78

Uploaded: ...

C

Description: Tested Topaz DeNoise AI on M78. Looks great!

Uploaded: ...

Celestron RASA
ASI533MC Pro

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Status	Basic success
Started	...
Astrometry.net job	4228520
PixInsight job	n/a
PixInsight queue size	n/a
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M78 - an impressive target seen from the city of Sofia

M78 - an impressive target seen from the city of Sofia

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M78 - an impressive target seen from the city of Sofia

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