Dolphin Head Nebula SH2-308 HOO RASA8 (Brandon Tackett)

Dolphin Head Nebula SH2-308 HOO RASA8

Definitely a challenging target from 39 degrees north latitude. The nebulae only rises to 26 degrees above my southern horizon at the meridian. I still wanted to give it a good run this year.

I used a standard HOO color combination and then used a blurred blue color mask in pixinsight to increase the total saturation in the blue areas that were masked. I also completed a first and used the O3 layer as the luminance because there is not much hydrogen structure. I was excited to see the hydrogen located on the left side of the frame and in the future will put it more into frame.

I also used starnet V2 and found it to be strong improvement from the previous version. On my standard image for both star form and removing stars with significant less artifact. My the GPU acceleration on my computer V1 runs in 10-12 seconds for this size image and 15 seconds for V2 with the 128 stride length for both. I definitely have preferred version 2, but am trying to add it to some of the EZ star reduction techniques without avail

The Nebula is an emission nebula in the constellation of Canis Major. The center star is a super hot Wolf-Rayet star EZ Canis Major. that is shedding a sun mass of every material every 10K years in solar winds . The solar winds 1,700 km/s compress the gas and the intense UV radiation causes it to emit the colored nebula we can visualize. The Wolf-Rayet star surface is devoid of hydrogen and thought to be a brief precursor phase prior to eventual super nova. The nebula is in our own Milky Way about 4.5K light years away. The nebula itself measures an estimated 60 light years across.

Original
Final
B

B

Description: Full Field

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Hydrogen and Oxygen Narrowband Only!
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Status	Advanced success
Started	...
Astrometry.net job	5457236
PixInsight job	ISQDV3RXB8CP39129QV03PSFR6GREQDE
PixInsight queue size	n/a
PixInsight stage	TASK_LOG

RA (center)	06h54m13s.70
RA (top/left)	06h50m27s.85
RA (top/right)	06h50m06s.53
RA (bottom/right)	06h58m03s.30
RA (bottom/left)	06h58m14s.61

Dec (center)	-23°54′59″.0
Dec (top/left)	-22°33′35″.3
Dec (top/right)	-25°13′30″.9
Dec (bottom/right)	-25°16′03″.7
Dec (bottom/left)	-22°36′01″.4

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