Celestial hemisphere:  Northern  ·  Constellation: Cassiopeia (Cas)  ·  Contains:  Bubble Nebula  ·  HD220057  ·  LBN 548  ·  LBN 549  ·  LDN 1231  ·  NGC 7635  ·  Sh2-162
Getting plate-solving status, please wait...
NGC7635 - The Bubble Nebula from the 2022 Logan Valley Star Party, wadeh237
Powered byPixInsight

NGC7635 - The Bubble Nebula from the 2022 Logan Valley Star Party

Getting plate-solving status, please wait...
NGC7635 - The Bubble Nebula from the 2022 Logan Valley Star Party, wadeh237
Powered byPixInsight

NGC7635 - The Bubble Nebula from the 2022 Logan Valley Star Party

Equipment

Loading...

Acquisition details

Loading...

Description

This is NGC7635 - The Bubble Nebula in the constellation of Cassiopeia, taken on the nights of June 24, 25 and 26, from the Logan Valley Star Party in Oregon.

The nebula was captured in Ha, OIII and SII.  The stars are RGB.  Normally, when I do narrow band, I capture all 3 filters, but don't necessarily use the data.  If I am going to do a "realistic" color image, I typically use just Ha and OIII for the nebula, and skip the SII.  I typically incorporate SII only when I am doing the Hubble palette.  In this case, I wanted to try a narrow band blend method described by Adam Block in his Horizons video for NGC3199.  In that video, he maps Ha and SII to the red channel, SII and OIII to the green channel, and 2x the OIII to the blue channel.  He uses this as a starting place and then adjusts the channels to taste.  This gives significance to the SII data, as it makes areas with Ha and SII overlap tend to be orange.

I spent quite a bit of time on the color balance.  I think that it works, but I hope to improve with practice.  It was certainly a learning experience.

One issue that I have with this, is that I wanted better star color.  I am using RGB stars, but the 5 minute subexposures were long enough that there was a fair amount of saturation.  I may end up dropping my star color exposures down to 60 seconds in the future.  Beyond that, there is a lack of blue stars in the image.  I have to wonder if there is some dust in the region between us and the stars that is attenuating blue.  It's also possible that using a screen blend to bring them in altered the colors (although there are no obvious blue stars even in the RGB data prior to blending).

The capture details are as follows:

Telescope: Astro-Physics AP130GTX
Camera: QSI 690 WSG-8
Mount: AP1100GTO-CP4
Guiding: PHD2 with Starlight Xpress Ultrastar and QSI built-in OAG
Capture Software: NINA

Exposures:
           16x600 seconds Ha
           16x600 seconds OIII
           16x600 seconds SII
           11x300 seconds Red
           10x300 seconds Green
            9x300 seconds Blue

Processed in PixInsight

Comments

Sky plot

Sky plot

Histogram

NGC7635 - The Bubble Nebula from the 2022 Logan Valley Star Party, wadeh237