Dreyer's Nebula (IC447). I only recently became aware of Dreyer's Nebula, a gorgeous blue reflection nebula floating off the coast of the massive red cloud that holds the Cone & Foxfur nebula. This target is far from unknown (
despite its name, it appears to have been discovered by Barnard in 1894); but it is nowhere near as popular as the
Cone and Foxfur, which I have already imaged, so I thought it would make a nice addition to my collection.
This is the kind of target that I generally would like to shoot in broadband, with just a UV/IR cut filter, like
M78 or
NGC 1333. But in this case, I experimented with two filters: the
Antlia Triband RGB and the
Antlia Quad-band. After my previous
success with the Triband on the Seagull Nebula, I thought it would be interesting to test it on a reflection nebula like this one, and I was generally quite pleased--not only with the amount of signal it captured, but with the star colors as well. I also decided to give my recently-ordered Quad-band filter a try. This filter did a great job capturing the reflection nebula, but there was something about the star color that didn't appeal to me. I also learned that my 180-second exposure length tended to overexpose the stars, so I may adjust that on the filter's next outing. I captured over 27 hours of data before wringing enough noise out of the image to call it finished. I think it differs from my typical "pure" broadband images, but it still has a fairly natural look to it. This proved to be a fairly long but very gratifying project.
(Captured: Askar FRA500, AM5, ASI183MC Pro, Antlia Triband RGB Filter, Antlia Quadband Filter. Processed: AstroPixelProcessor, PixInsight, GraXpert, StarXterminator, NoiseXterminator, Blanshan/Cranfield Star Reduction Script)
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