It seems like I am never truly 'done' as I keep doing minor tweaks until I can't stand it anymore, then I am done! So this was my attempt at getting a detailed image of the central portion of the Rosette Nebula also known as SH2-275 or Caldwell 49. Located in Monoceros the Rosette is approximately 5000 Light-years away and 130 LY across. It consists of numerous young stars produced as the gas that makes up the nebula condenses as a result of tidal forces and gravity. Also found here are dark nebulae which completely block light from behind. For you Trekkies (like me), this object always reminded me of the Guardian of Forever
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The central open star cluster for which my image is focused on is known as NGC 2244. I first imaged this several years ago with a much larger field of view as is commonly done in order to get the entire complex into the image. I really wanted to try and see if I could pull out some fine detail with the Edge800 this time around.
I went with the IDAS NBZ filter which is a dual band (Ha-OIIl) filter for OSC cameras like the ASI294MC which is what I used. This camera pairs up well with the longer focal length Edge800 with the (0.7x) FR. I am very impressed with this Filter as well as it does a great job with this scope at F/7 but also when using the Hyperstar at F/1.9. I have not tried it at the native F/10 but I think I would be pushing my luck at that point. Some of my favorite parts are the bright dense areas on the left along with the dark zones on the bottom. The loop in the central portion came out really well as did the golden swirls on the right side.
In order to get the colors separated the RGB channels and used the red channel for Ha. A blend of 70% green and 30% blue was used to make the OIII. I did try to make a synthetic SII image using various methods but nothing worked out well so I stuck with the HOO combination. The data was pretty good even though I did some imaging when the moon was out (of course not right next to the object). In fact this data was better than I collected on any previous attempt. Since the moon was out I was very fastidious going through the data and ended up not using 77 exposures (~ one third of the data).
Dates: 2-8, 2-9, 2-10, 2-14, 2-15, 2-18
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