The New General Catalogue number 281, more commonly known as the Pacman Nebula due to its resemblance to an old and famous video game character is an HII emisson nebula located in Cassiopeia. IC 1590 is the central star cluster composed by young OB supergiant stars. These stars blow intense stellar winds shaping the forms of the nebula and creating structures analogous to the Cone nebula or the pillars of creation. Several Bok globules are also detectable within the nebula, as well as a central cloud of dust. This generates a spectacular composition of shapes and colors linked to the different abunancies of excited hydrogen, oxygen and sulfur. The Pacman nebula is located rather distantly from us at 10000 light years.

I was fascinated by this beautiful nebula since quite long time and generated a first version 3 years ago with my previous RASA scope (not published). Although the result was reasonably well defined, I was frustrated by the limited focal length of the scope (620mm), thus I decided to wait to receive my super-refractor of 180mm (1280mm focal length) before to publish it. My objective was to generate a highly resolved version of the nebula by keeping smooth color transitions, not too saturated and sharp contrasts. I thus shooted the nebula during 15 nights. As the SII emission is particularly dense of fantastic structures, I generated many subs to maximize its sharpness, thus enabling me to better highlight the color transitions. For the Ha subs, I only selected the sharpest ones. During the processing I immediately noticed that I had a lot of signal, thus requiring only a very minimal denoising (020). the starting sharpness of the Ha layer was actually quite high and the use of BXT almost insignficantly contributed to the end result.

As always, don't hesitate to comment/provide critical input on the image, it is always interesting to hear positive/negative feedbacks that enable me to continuosly progress in astrophotography.

CS!

Nicola