IC 2948 | The Running Chicken Nebula (Kevin Morefield)

IC 2948 | The Running Chicken Nebula

The stars of the show here are the Bok globules, as they seem to be whenever they are present. I see these particular globules referred to as Thackeray's globules for the man who discovered them in 1950. Their darkness set against the bright surrounding hollow lends dimensionality to the image.

I've never seen a chicken here, ambulatory or not. However, I do see a yellow turkey standing in the center! The yellow colors come where SII and Ha are both quite bright. The SII here is very detailed and really gives texture to the image. I think it's worth uploading all three masters so you can see the differences. SII is just crucial here!

The object is also quite bright. I shot about one hour each for RGB just for the stars but when I put the meager three hours of data together it looked surprisingly like a viable image. In the end that data was only used for the stars but I'll upload a close crop of the RGB data that I found interesting.

If anyone is looking really closely at the acquisition details you'll notice I shot 99 subs of SII at 120 second exposures in addition to 73 at 600 seconds each. That was not on purpose! My rig has two scopes, each with the same FLI filter wheel. The FLI driver creates a name for the FW when it is connected and increments the names as more FLI FWs are identified. Somehow, my dormant scope was powered on and that FW was first to get a name. Voyager then connected to the dormant scope and whirled away the filters on the wrong scope for 5 nights before I figured it out! So I shot 5 nights of SII on every object, including all of my planned, short RGB subs for this one. I used a FITS header batch editor to correct those to SII and tossed them in the soup. If anyone knows how to get the FLI FWs to maintain a static name please let me know!

Original
C
D
E
F

C

Title: RGB only close up

Description: 3 hoiurs of RGB captured for the stars

Uploaded: ...

D

Title: SII

Uploaded: ...

E

Title: Ha

Uploaded: ...

F

Title: OIII

Uploaded: ...

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Status	Advanced success
Started	...
Astrometry.net job	7823178
PixInsight job	5J4BZSLRTOCIJ4D3FPEQZN6WSHQJ4571
PixInsight queue size	n/a
PixInsight stage	TASK_LOG

RA (center)	11h38m44s.252
RA (top/left)	11h41m48s.581
RA (top/right)	11h35m43s.666
RA (bottom/right)	11h35m36s.983
RA (bottom/left)	11h41m47s.598

Dec (center)	-63°26′38″.65
Dec (top/left)	-63°13′22″.22
Dec (top/right)	-63°12′41″.17
Dec (bottom/right)	-63°39′42″.16
Dec (bottom/left)	-63°40′21″.36

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