SH2 129 and Ou4 - The Flying Bat and Squid Nebula (Doug Gray)

Celestial hemisphere: Northern · Constellation: Cepheus (Cep) · Contains: Sh2-129

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SH2 129 and Ou4 - The Flying Bat and Squid Nebula

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SH2 129 and Ou4 - The Flying Bat and Squid Nebula

Capturing this squid seems to be a benchmark task for many astrophotographers on this site. I suspect many folks give up when they cant find it in over an hour of stacked OIII subs. I almost gave up after I could only see the tip of one end after 20 hours. However since it is in the northern sky, its not very hard for me to get lots of data if the weather is good and I don't have another project I'm excited about. This is now my longest integration at almost 60 hours. I switched from 300s to 600s subs for OIII halfway through, both because the target was so faint I thought I might be loosing signal to quantization, and for fear of running out of disk space while attempting to process everything.

In the end, I managed to get most of the squid to show up. However I had to do so much stretching that it's swimming in an ocean of noise, so I've kept it just faint enough to be detected. The flying bat was much easier of course. I'm planning on trying this region with a f/1.8 35mm lens later, which I hope will reveal a tiny squid in much less time.

Stacking with 2x drizzle, gradient removal, and RGB photometric color calibration in Siril. Star removal via content aware fill, camera raw filter, and all kinds of creative processing in Photoshop.

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Status	Advanced success
Started	...
Astrometry.net job	4889251
PixInsight job	BOHCH03AGGW9ZKYD1YY5UV3UQVQJ3NWZ
PixInsight queue size	n/a
PixInsight stage	n/a

RA (center)	21h11m34s.15
RA (top/left)	21h03m51s.53
RA (top/right)	21h04m09s.18
RA (bottom/right)	21h19m52s.41
RA (bottom/left)	21h18m25s.47

Dec (center)	+60°08′26″.6
Dec (top/left)	+58°56′19″.3
Dec (top/right)	+61°24′02″.8
Dec (bottom/right)	+61°18′43″.6
Dec (bottom/left)	+58°51′28″.5

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SH2 129 and Ou4 - The Flying Bat and Squid Nebula

SH2 129 and Ou4 - The Flying Bat and Squid Nebula

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SH2 129 and Ou4 - The Flying Bat and Squid Nebula

SH2 129 and Ou4 - The Flying Bat and Squid Nebula

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