... a rolling ball of fire in its wake, vapor streaming from his nostrils, Balerion rides the skies of Cygnus, with the swan cowering in fear......... or something like that
Anyhoo. This is fairly remarkable to me that I've captured a target I was not even aware existed until a few weeks ago. I was prepared to chase another beginner-friendly object, probably the Crescent, when I began seeing a few renditions of this Flying Dragon pop up on The Bin. Hmmmmm, intriguing. And then I read about how exceedingly faint and difficult it was... oh well... time to accept a challenge. I almost hit the abort button when I saw the first frame... or rather, didn't see much of anything with a 5 minute Ha exposure. My greatest trepidation, that I might spend 3 nights on this (rare, precious, clear summer nights) only to find out that I had totally missed the framing and had merely captured a dragon wing or something. This was even more of a concern with my 115mm refractor's FOV. So I kept lengthening the Ha test exposures until I could BARELY make out the faint outline of the whole dragon, and this turned out to be 8 minutes. Being comfortable that I had it framed, I just left the subs at 8 min and started collecting. Over 13 hours after scattered subframe rejections, spanning 3 nights. The stars are 30sec RGB, color calibrated with SPCC.
I'm glad I tried. Not perfect by any means, but gives me a confidence boost to attempt more complex targets. Also, the power of PixInsight cannot be overstated.
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