Instrument

12.5" RCOS @  ~f/9 (2880 mm fl) 0.643 arcsec / pixel.  The Zoomify image scale is 1.28 to 3.09 arcsec / pixel.

Mount

Paramount ME

Camera

SBIG STL-11000 w/ internal filter wheel, AstroDon Filters

Acquisition Data

10/24/2009 to 11/16/2009 Chino Valley, AZ... with CCDAutoPilot3 & CCDSoft.

Exposure

SII   600 min (20 x 30 min. bin 1x1)

Ha   600 min (20 x 30 min. bin 1x1)
OIII  540 min (18 x 30 min. bin 1x1)

SII, Ha & OIII are mapped to RGB respectivly. 
Click here for an LRGB natural color version.
Click here for an Ha filtered b/w version.

Software

• CCDSoft, CCDStack, Photoshop CS w/ the Fits Liberator plugin. Noel Carboni's actions.

• PixFix32 (pre-beta) to repair hot/cold pixels and column defects.

• CCDStack to calibrate, register, normalize, data reject and combine the sub exposures.

• PhotoShop for the RGB combine &  on-linear stretching.

North is to the right.

The Bubble Nebula, cataloged as NGC 7635 and Sharpless 162, is an HII emission region in the constellation Cassiopeia, at a distance of about 11,000 light-years. The "bubble" is created by the stellar wind from a massive young, hot, 8.7 magnitude central star. William Herschel discovered the nebula in 1787.

These false color images were acquired with Ha, SII and OIII filters mapped to the RGB channels respectively. The colors of top image more closely follow the Hubble Palette, with the color channels pretty much stretched to equal levels.  The presence of sulfur, hydrogen and oxygen are clearly shown. Red indicates the presence sulfur, green hydrogen and blue oxygen. With no color manipulation, the image would be basically green, due to the dominance of hydrogen.

The lower image was additionally processed to produce a color motif made popular by the Hubble imaging team.