This colorful and detail-rich region of the winter Milky-way does not rise more than 48° above my horizon when passing the meridian. Fortunately seeing was not bad during some nights in February/March which made it possible to catch some nice detail anyway.
After taking some hours without any filter I realized that this field is very different from the Horsehead which I imaged some weeks earlier and where a good result was absolutely possible without using any filter. Since my goal was to make the Fox Fur visible, inspecting the first RGB-substacks lead to some serious disappointment - there was almost nothing to see from the Fox Fur which is so prominent when imaging with a H-Alpha filter.
Some days later my first DualBand-Filter, the IDAS NBZ, arrived and I took the plunge and revisited this scene every clear night, no matter how much the sky was affected by moonlight. And this did the trick, all RGB-data still was perfectly fine for the stars and the bluish reflection nebula. Combined with the freshly gathered HAlpha-stacks the so much-wanted reddish nebulae fi-na-lly popped out too
RGB [no filter] - 1756×10seconds (4h 52′)
IDAS-NBZ DualBand - 1230×22seconds (7h 31′)
SQM-L during RGB: 20.20-20.65 mag/arcsec^2
SQM-L during Narrowband: 18-19 mag/arcsec^2 (60-80% Moonphase)
CS,
Daniel
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