The Horsehead nebula is one of the most popular astrophotography targets, with some 11,000 Astrobin images turning up in a search using the string "Horsehead nebula" -- and with this post, I add yet another shot to the pile!

This image is the result of about 22 hours of integration using my CDK600, divided roughly equally among R, G, B, and Ha filters, and acquired over the course of 15 nights from November of 2022 through January of this year (I threw out an additional 16 hours of exposures due to generally poor seeing conditions !).

This is also another shot at the Horsehead for me personally. My first attempt came from a memorable night on New Year's Eve of 2010, using a CDK17 in a roll-off roof observatory that I opened earlier that year (since decommissioned) outside my family's vacation home in rural British Columbia. That was my first image to get published, and I was also lucky enough to have it end up on the cover of a 2012 astrophotography calendar produced by Canada's magazine of popular astronomy, SkyNews, to mark the publication of its 100th issue.

I found the new image to be very challenging to process, because the blue light from Alnitak that flooded the left-side, from just beyond the edge of the frame, flared into a tower of very distracting pencil-thin rays that threatened to dominate the final image (I might need to put a shroud on the scope?). I could get a decent result only by excessively smoothing out and darkening parts of the left side, and generally using more aggressive processing strategies than usual (though I could not remove all traces of the rays without losing too much genuine detail). The generally poor seeing also led me to downsample the final image from the native resolution of my system by 75%, for a final plate scale of about 0.62"/pixel, with the image spanning about 31' on a side. Well, I'm fortunate to have problems like these to deal with, so enough with the whining!