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Astrophotography by Bob Franke

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Sh2-155 The Cave Nebula - Ha Filtered


      Click the full screen zoom button           ^
     
Click the image to Zoom and Pan              

Click here to view the image without Zoomify (1950 x 1300)

 

 

Instrument

12.5" RCOS @  ~f/9 (2880 mm fl) 0.64 arcsec / pixel.  The Zoomify image scale is 1.28 to 3.33 arcsec / pixel.

Mount

Paramount ME

Camera

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

Acquisition Data

9/11/2010 to 10/1/2010 Chino Valley, AZ... with CCDAutoPilot3 & CCDSoft.  AOL guided

Exposure

Ha                 480 min (16 x 30 min, bin 1x1)

Click here for the RGB natural color image.
Click here for the color mapped narrowband image.

Software

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

  • PixFix32 (pre-beta) to repair column defects.

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

  • PhotoShop for on-linear stretching.

Comment

North is to the top.
 

Sh2-155, The Cave Nebula, is a faint area of Ha emission and dust in the constellation of Cepheus. The nebula gets is name from the darker area, at the center left, which visually appears as a cave. This highly stretched image brightens the cave and shows some of its structure.

This image, captured with a hydrogen-alpha filter, shows the extent of the hydrogen gas.