IC 5146 located in the northern constellation of Cygnus is a star cluster embedded within a reflection nebula at a distance of around 3000 ly. The cluster is also known as collinder 470 and has a lovely dark nebula tail (Barnard 168)
This has been a challenge to process as I have seen many results showing the blue oxygen cloud surrounding the nebula which I really wanted to show, it lead me to do a bit of research on this object to ensure that the blue oxygen is in fact present, not that I do not trust anyone but free creativity confuses the true nature of the object sometomes
. I also took a look at other images of this subject on AB where the l-enhance was used and it appears that its difficult to expose. I elected to not add more integration time as a result. IMO this highlights that the L-enhance is not very good at capturing the oxygen in the presence of a stong Ha signal, in this case completely drowning the faint oxygen signal.
The dark nebula is just about visible with some imagination, it flows to the east of the image. Probably with longer integration and darker skies this would be more clearly discernible.
I need to play around with the gain settings more as the background is still quite grainy, maybe solveable with more integration time too. Learned a hell of a lot from this project. Onwards and upwards.
Another enjoyable project and one I will revisit under different cicumstances.
CS and hope you like.
Brad
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