Wonderful, consecutive clear nights here in the UK, a pity they coincide with full moon. Not wanting to waste any clear sky, I thought I would try some more planetary nebulae; this one NGC 2371, lies 4,300 LY away in Gemini. Consisting of two lobes (NGC 2371 and 2372) clearly visible at 5 o'clock and 11 o'clock positions, a little detail can be seen in the these, including some knots around the blue progenitor star - burning brightly at ~134,000 Celsius. A portion of the outer halo is seen at each end, and as a circular halo around the lobes, resembling a sweet wrapper.
Sadly this is no 'quality street' (a brand of sweets in UK) - despite a reasonable integration, I set the gain a bit low, to try and reduce the inevitable noise in my L-eNhance filter, and to avoid burning out the core. Guiding and imaging at f10 is always challenging, and this coupled with mediocre seeing, has led to a rather soft image. For a much nicer colour and detail please see
@Ruediger's fine
image (albeit taken with a 14" planewave and 10 micron mount
The mouseover shows a cropped image up-scaled x 2
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