Southern Hemisphere Astro

Equipment

ZWO Seestar S50 · ZWO Seestar S50 Integrated Camera · ZWO Seestar S50 Integrated LP Filter · ZWO Seestar S50 Integrated UV/IR Cut Filter · ZWO Seestar S50 Integrated Mount · Pleiades Astrophoto PixInsight · Russell Croman Astrophotography BlurXTerminator · Russell Croman Astrophotography NoiseXTerminator · SetiAstro Suite Pro · Siril Team Siril · ZWO ASIFitsView

Integration

36h 5′ 50″

Hello, Last couple of posts were from South Africa, so now a quick switch back to USA & Poland. For a while now I've been focusing on doing lots of projects on faint nebulae (the reason I haven't published many of them is that a lot were beyond Seestar's reach, or even when I finally managed to capture something, I didn't have much signal to work with). Long story short, the last couple of months I've been pretty happily burning through imaging time. So with this object I thought, finally, that's something easy to do — and what do you know, I was obviously wrong. I've got a new category for those "annoying" targets now, but let's save the tirade of swear words for the Tulip Nebula, which is even more annoying than this one (at least for Seestar, and for my expectations of what I want to see at the end). So this is the Cocoon Nebula, nested in the Barnard 168 dark nebula. The data was collected with my friend Daniel, and I think we got to over 35hrs, Bortle 1 & Bortle 3. So why is it annoying? Well, it's quite time-consuming to gather — a mix of broadband and narrowband filters, since the two nebulae require exactly the opposite approach when it comes to data collection. Then there's the post-processing: continuum subtraction, HaRGB mixing, getting the Cocoon red, getting the outer shell sort of blue-ish, without blowing out the dark nebula at the same time. Then the opposite — revealing the dark nebula without blowing out the Cocoon, without messing up the blue bits, and revealing that small blue nebula below, etc, etc. And at the end it seems i could have frame it a bit up to get more of that Barnards. Overall, many, many attempts and restarts from scratch on this one and a bit of framing dissapoitment — but I got there in the end, and I think I'm quite happy with what I got. So enjoy, and happy Friday!