LDN 1357 & 1358 - The Helping Hands Nebula 2 Panel Mosaic (Greg Nelson)

Celestial hemisphere: Northern · Constellation: Cassiopeia (Cas) · Contains: LBN 643 · LDN 1355 · LDN 1357 · LDN 1358 · SU Cas

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LDN 1357 & 1358 - The Helping Hands Nebula 2 Panel Mosaic

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LDN 1357 & 1358 - The Helping Hands Nebula 2 Panel Mosaic

This 2 Panel Mosaic of LDN 1357 and LDN 1358 was a journey over several months that led me into several new spaces. I selected this tough dark nebula to image because I wanted to see the limits of my observatory in the Bortles 4-6 (East to West) East Phoenix skies. The Chroma LoGlow Luminance filter gave excellent results, but the standard SBIG RGB filters just left too many gradients to remove to reveal any of the low level colors.

This sent me on a journey to see if Chroma could coat their stock RGB filters to give LoGlow characteristics to the RGB filters. That can, but that turned out to be expensive. This led me to an option to have Diffraction Limited 3D print a filter holder to mount the Chroma LoGlow Luminance filter permanently inline between the filter wheel and the camera. This solution cost 5% of the coated filters option, so I tried it. There are some tradeoffs and I am still evaluating, but the good news was that the RGB data for this image was collected with significantly less gradients and you can judge the results for yourself.

This image also led me down the path to learn John Murphy's Normalized Scale Gradient and Photometric Mosaic software and techniques. I can tell you now that I am a big fan. I have switched all my processing to Normalized Scan Gradient away from Pixinsight's stock Localnormalization implementation. And I've never had an easier time stitching together a mosaic.

Comments are always welcome. Thanks for reading.,

Arizona Astrophotographers
Dark Nebula
CMOS Imagers

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The “AstroBin Image of the Day and Top Picks”, or IOTD/TP, is a long-running system to promote beautiful, interesting, peculiar, or otherwise amazing astrophotographs, with a focus on technical excellence. Learn more.

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Status	Advanced success
Started	...
Astrometry.net job	6808558
PixInsight job	KYM6VGH578VF2H2UKHMN3P7O2Y2V5661
PixInsight queue size	n/a
PixInsight stage	TASK_LOG

RA (center)	02h53m05s.591
RA (top/left)	02h53m14s.411
RA (top/right)	02h58m19s.141
RA (bottom/right)	02h52m56s.442
RA (bottom/left)	02h48m01s.898

Dec (center)	+69°12′55″.74
Dec (top/left)	+68°38′34″.71
Dec (top/right)	+69°33′20″.36
Dec (bottom/right)	+69°47′14″.96
Dec (bottom/left)	+68°51′58″.16

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LDN 1357 & 1358 - The Helping Hands Nebula 2 Panel Mosaic

LDN 1357 & 1358 - The Helping Hands Nebula 2 Panel Mosaic

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LDN 1357 & 1358 - The Helping Hands Nebula 2 Panel Mosaic

LDN 1357 & 1358 - The Helping Hands Nebula 2 Panel Mosaic

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