The Wizard Nebula (NGC 7380) (Serhii Herniak)

The Wizard Nebula (NGC 7380)

The biggest project so far - 4 sessions, more than 7h of integration time in total! Capturing this nebula turned out for me to be a big story of successes and failures. First of all - this was the first time I tried dithering when capturing light frames. And this technic helped me a lot with minimizing noise, especially the walking noise! Extracting wavelet layers I noticed the noise only in the first 2 layers - before, I got the noise literally in each wavelet layer. The main failure when capturing this image - it turned out that the positions of mirrors in my Newtonian telescope weren't so accurate and due to this I saw a lot of coma artifacts, although I was using the coma corrector to prevent this. The reason for the incorrect mirrors' positions is that I washed my mirrors at the beginning of the summer and assembled them improperly - I've used the laser collimator for aligning mirrors but messed up with the proper position of the secondary mirror. Hence, from the laser collimator's point of view, everything was aligned, but in reality, everything was a bit shifted. Only the last session was captured after I noticed the issue and fixed it using the cheshire collimator.

Original
B
Final
C

B

Title: V2

Description: Removed some of the green color noticed after publishing the initial version of the image

Uploaded: ...

C

Description: Another version of the Wizard Nebula - the source files were the same, but the processing was slightly different. Learned some new tips&tricks regarding processing in PixInsight and decided to try out some of them. In this version, the most bright stars don't look like just white blobs, but like actually stars with some halos around, also the color of nebulosity is more or less how it should look like - previously, I applied the SCNR process in the wrong way (or in the wrong situation, this is something I haven't figured out yet) and that affected color dramatically. Most likely, that's not the final version of this image, and learning more and more about PixInsight I'll try to process this image better.

Uploaded: ...

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Status	Advanced success
Started	...
Astrometry.net job	6234397
PixInsight job	5FLBRLAOFZ2KR5NEFFPFKANWXSPRSPJO
PixInsight queue size	n/a
PixInsight stage	TASK_LOG

RA (center)	22h47m31s.80
RA (top/left)	22h48m03s.12
RA (top/right)	22h42m18s.61
RA (bottom/right)	22h47m00s.22
RA (bottom/left)	22h52m42s.99

Dec (center)	+58°09′44″.10
Dec (top/left)	+58°50′57″.4
Dec (top/right)	+58°13′29″.9
Dec (bottom/right)	+57°28′32″.10
Dec (bottom/left)	+58°05′13″.0

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