Here is my latest image of Pacman Nebula, It took me 6 nights of imaging (9h 45' exposure time for the main image and 1h 21.5' exposure for colour stars) to complete and another couple of days of processing while I was trying some new things in PI. It's the first time I drizzled the data, used SPCC and took separate exposures for RGB stars. I have also used quite a lot of Bill Blanshan's PixelMath 'magic', this stuff works really well.
This image would definitely benefit from more exposure time, but I think it's time for another target. I may re-process it in future and use deconvolution, I have a feeling there could be some more detail in there... I also had a slight issue with the mount producing elongated stars, I did what I could to save them, although they are still not 100%.
The Pacman Nebula (NGC 281) is a large emission nebula appearing near the orange giant Schedar in the constellation Cassiopeia. The nebula lies approximately 9,200 light years away and occupies 35 arcminutes of the apparent sky. It is also catalogued as IC 11 and Sharpless 184 (Sh2-184). It was named the Pacman Nebula for its resemblance to Pac-Man, the character in the popular 1980s maze video game. In optical images, a dark dust lane forms the Pac-Man’s mouth.
The Pacman Nebula stretches 48 light years across. It is a star-forming region that contains young stars, large dark dust lanes and Bok globules. Bok globules are small, dense dark nebulae packed with material from which new stars are formed. The dark dust lane spreads unevenly across glowing clouds of hydrogen and its appearance suggests that it being sculpted by a massive star in the background, concealed by the dark clouds. (www.constellation-guide.com)
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