SH2-86 | NGC 6820 | NGC 6823 (Kevin Morefield)

SH2-86 | NGC 6820 | NGC 6823

While SH2-86 is how I mostly see this object listed, that appears to refer to the emission portion of the area. Within the emission nebula we also have an open star cluster, NGC 6823, and a reflection nebula, NGC 6820. From appearances, I would guess that the stars formed from the hydrogen cloud and the young blue stars are reflecting off of dust with the sphere they have created in the cloud.

While the nebule portion looks much more impressive without the stars or with them much reduced, since we have an open cluster where I chose to represent it fully and in RGB light. So the Nebula is a traditional SHO and the stars are RGB.

Having shot many objects in the Cygnus region (this lies just outside Cygnus in Vulpacula) I was surprise how dim the OIII an SII data came in. I initially shot 10 hours of OIII and went back for another 10 hours after seeing how little there was. Since the OIII and SII brought no new structures I could see, I used only Ha for the luminnace channel.

The SHO was assembled after removing stars via StarXterminator. I used the Color Calibration tool to get the inital color balance. The amount of stretch required to balance the SII and OIII with the Ha meant I needed some heavy noise reduction in the color data. I wanted just a bit more red in the image so I selectively added some red Ha data to the areas where the OIII was not strong.

To isolate the RGB stars I created an RGB master and then used StarXterminator to create a starless image. After a small amount of cleanup on the starless version, I subtracted the starless from the original to get the star only image. I have found this works better than relying on the star output option on StarXterminator and allows for removal of any residual stars in the starless version. The resulting star only image was added to the SHO for the final product.

Narrowband imaging
Sharpless2 Objects
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Status	Advanced success
Started	...
Astrometry.net job	6072216
PixInsight job	1980WH2OD5N7Q0M96N31MA97G9NBY85B
PixInsight queue size	n/a
PixInsight stage	TASK_LOG

RA (center)	19h43m20s.370
RA (top/left)	19h42m24s.193
RA (top/right)	19h41m59s.999
RA (bottom/right)	19h44m16s.189
RA (bottom/left)	19h44m41s.405

Dec (center)	+23°17′12″.51
Dec (top/left)	+23°41′58″.61
Dec (top/right)	+22°56′20″.15
Dec (bottom/right)	+22°52′24″.80
Dec (bottom/left)	+23°38′05″.31

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