Celestial hemisphere:  Northern  ·  Constellation: Cassiopeia (Cas)  ·  Contains:  LBN 576
Getting plate-solving status, please wait...
PoppedBalloon Mosaic, Nick Evans

PoppedBalloon Mosaic

Getting plate-solving status, please wait...
PoppedBalloon Mosaic, Nick Evans

PoppedBalloon Mosaic

Equipment

Loading...

Acquisition details

Loading...

Description

I've tried to image this in narrowband for many nights, and its still so faint! I captured a 2-6 hours over clear sky nights over 2 weeks in September during mostly a new moon.  There was a surprising amount of Sii in this target, but doesn't really pop out in any of the color combinations I tried (Forax, Dreamplease, Crazypanda, etc.) I ended up using Forax for this one. I think I need to get a more expensive Oiii filter because it takes so long to gather meaningful signal. I still don't think I got enough with 7 hours on Oiii.

A good chunk of this data was captured in bortle 6.5 skies during a new moon. I started imaging with a 2 panel for what I thought would cover the target. I was wrong and added two more panels later to fill in the edges better and the tail of the popped balloon. This resulted in a strange coverage area. After using MosaicByCoordinates and GradientMergeMosaic on each narrowband channel,  I cropped it to bring a reasonable image. A challenging and exciting target to hit, that I'm sure I'll come back to, but wanted to publish what I had so far. This thing thirsts for integration time, and I must feed the beast!

If you want to see it in LRGB, I also imaged it on my other scope (525mm Focal Length) which really shows how faint it is compared to this (1525mm Focal Length) narrowband image.


Mosaic - before cropping:
image.png

Comments

Sky plot

Sky plot

Histogram

PoppedBalloon Mosaic, Nick Evans