Celestial hemisphere:  Northern  ·  Constellation: Orion (Ori)  ·  Contains:  LDN 1627  ·  M 78  ·  NGC 2064  ·  NGC 2067  ·  NGC 2068  ·  NGC 2071  ·  VdB59  ·  VdB60
M78 nebula, NGC2071. OSC camera. Newtonian Astrograph., Martin Konrat
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M78 nebula, NGC2071. OSC camera. Newtonian Astrograph.

M78 nebula, NGC2071. OSC camera. Newtonian Astrograph., Martin Konrat
Powered byPixInsight

M78 nebula, NGC2071. OSC camera. Newtonian Astrograph.

Equipment

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Acquisition details

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Description

M78 nebula, NGC2071 Newtonian Astrograph Version. OSC camera.

About the Target:

M78 It's a reflection nebula (clouds of interstellar dust that shine due to reflected and scattered light from nearby stars) that's part of the Orion Molecular Cloud Complex, a large cloud of gas and dust around the famous M42 nebula.
Also included in this grouping are NGC 2064, NGC 2067 and NGC 2071 and other nebulae. M78 has an apparent size of 8.0 x 6.0 arc minutes. At a distance of 1,600 light-years this corresponds to a maximum spatial diameter of about 4 light-years.

About the Processing Technique

A one shot color camera, the asi2600mc, with a simple optolong uv/ir cut filter was used. I live in an, officially speaking, Bortle 4 area, but when Orion rises in the sky, the telescope is pointed over a zone of crop fields, there is no city light in that direction, hence the good results with not so long integration times.
I spent some time using the subframe selector in pixinsight to choose the best images (although I took 4.5 hours of good images, I only integrated 3 hours of them).
The linear phase consisted only of DBE, BG neutralization, color calibration, SCNR, and a small amount of Russel Croman's amazing process Blur Xterminator.
Stretch was opened with Arcsinh and finished with a histogram transform. After that it was a game of curves and masks. 
This workflow was used for both the UV/IR filter integration and the Duo-Narrowband in paralell.
At this point, I removed the stars from both images and blended the H-alpha from the Duo-Narrowband version into the RGB version to make a few Ha to pop up. Sutile difference.
Next, rgb stars back into the rgb/nb starless image. Then noise reduction, more curves and masks, dark structures enhancement scrip, HDR transformation process applied only to the core of m78, and a small amount of unsharp mask.


🗓 December, 14th to 16th. 2022
📍 Giruá, RS, Brazil. Bortle 4.
🔭 FotonAstro Astropipe 200MM F4 Newtonian Astrograph / AM5 Eq Mount
📷 asi2600mc camera
🕶 Optolong UV/IR filter / Antlia ALP-T duo narrowband
- 60 x 180s UV/IR filter
- 37 x 300s with antlia duo narrowband filter
🧑‍💻 pixinsight, photoshop

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