"The Night of the Dark Shark Nebula" LDN 1235 (Brandon Tackett)

"The Night of the Dark Shark Nebula" LDN 1235

I was excited to go after and complete my first composition of a Dark Nebula beside the horse head. I had attempted to get this in early winter last year, but could never get the amount of signal to make it pop. I was able to get 3/4 good night spent gathering quality time on the target near a new moon while I was also tinkering with new wide angle Milky Way scapes.

I am happy with the results, somewhat noisy for 10 hrs of integration with the RASA, but part of the balancing to get a desired level of contrast. I tried to push the data on my first edits, falling prey to trying to make my image look like some of the really incredible ones here on astrobin. I eventually came to my senses and toned it down to a respectable image.

Now onto the Elephant Trunk, Lion Nebula, and the rest of the zoo astrophotography that I plan to print and hang in my kids rooms. Yes, I am that dad and you should probably feel sorry for my kids. I may have also had too much fun making a quick photoshop Daddy, Momma, Baby, Grandma, Grandpa shark Collage on the second image.

The Dark Shark is located in the Constellation of Cephus approximately 650 light years from earth. Dark Nebula are thick clouds of gas that absorb the wavelengths of visible light that obstruct our view of the more distant stars. Also in the shark are located 2 fascinating reflection nebula on the head (VdB 150) and under portion of the thorax (VdB149. However, my favorite is the beautiful spiral galaxy that can easily be made out behind the dorsal fin PGC 67671. Further research on the simbad database shows this galaxy is about 57 million light years distance from earth.

Definitely check out the full image to see the galaxy and better detail of the whole image. I drizzled the image which definitely help with start size and shape with my under sampled set up.

Final
Original
B

B

Description: Baby Shark Version

Uploaded: ...

Dark Nebula
Celestron RASA
N.I.N.A. Users
Central USA

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Deep sky
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Status	Advanced success
Started	...
Astrometry.net job	4779719
PixInsight job	VLLAAWG6ES6AX0GKRNX7B1LVF61SU66Z
PixInsight queue size	n/a
PixInsight stage	TASK_LOG

RA (center)	22h04m28s.53
RA (top/left)	22h22m49s.55
RA (top/right)	21h46m22s.70
RA (bottom/right)	21h47m46s.15
RA (bottom/left)	22h20m55s.64

Dec (center)	+73°09′49″.8
Dec (top/left)	+73°55′58″.4
Dec (top/right)	+73°57′37″.7
Dec (bottom/right)	+72°18′09″.2
Dec (bottom/left)	+72°16′32″.9

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