Pelican Nebula – Enhanced Detail

According to Wikipedia: “The Pelican is much studied because it has a particularly active mix of star formation and evolving gas clouds. The light from young energetic stars is slowly transforming cold gas to hot and causing an ionization front gradually to advance outward.” “Millions of years from now this nebula may no longer beContinue reading “Pelican Nebula – Enhanced Detail”

Lynds Dark Nebula 1251

Lynds original catalog of dark nebulae was published in 1962. The catalog contains dark nebulae that were identified by Lynds’ visual inspection of the Palomar-Schmidt photographs. The clouds had to be visible on the red and blue photographs to be recorded. The original catalog contained 1802 objects. LDN 1251 is a Dark Nebula in theContinue reading “Lynds Dark Nebula 1251”

Bubble Nebula – Wide Angle View

With clouds hanging over the observatory, there is another option. You can process raw images from a remote observatory. Raw images for this project were taken last September from a remote imaging observatory that is located in New Mexico at an elevation of 7400 feet. The telescope was a 106mm Takahashi FSQ 106EDXIII telescope. AContinue reading “Bubble Nebula – Wide Angle View”

Tadpoles – Color

The clouds are moving in, so imaging on this nebula has ended. Three narrow band filters were used and were assigned RGB colors based on what is called the Hubble palette. This was tweaked by removing some of the green coloration while emphasizing blue. A total of 35 thirty minute images were stacked, for aContinue reading “Tadpoles – Color”

Tadpoles – Happy New Year

These are the Tadpoles of IC-410.  They seem appropriate for the New Year when we are celebrating a fresh start or a new beginning.  This emission nebula lies about 12000 light years away, and the Tadpoles are about 10 light years long.  This is a stacked composite of 17 half hour h-alpha exposures taken through myContinue reading “Tadpoles – Happy New Year”

Elephant Trunks Nebula – IC 1396 – Color

My earlier greyscale photo of this nebula was derived from 15 one hour exposures through an H-Alpha filter which were used as the red channel in this color image.. An additional 11 half hour images were taken through an OIII filter for the blue channel. An RGB color image usually uses three different monochrome images.Continue reading “Elephant Trunks Nebula – IC 1396 – Color”