Exploring the Suffolk Virginia Night Sky – Astronomy, Astrophotography, Telescopes, EAA – Planets and Stars and Nebula and Galaxies – Looking, Learning, Sharing… Let's see what we can see…
A nice clear night with no Moon. A bit humid and the temperature dropped to the upper 30s after the Sun went down. I set up framing in NINA and created a sequence to collect 6 hours of light from the Rosette Nebula. The sequence kicked off at 8:30 PM Eastern on 12/30/2024 and ran till about 3:15 AM on 12/31/2024. A meridian flip was performed just after midnight.
The Rosette Nebula is a star cluster and emission nebula located in the constellation of Monoceros. The nebula and star cluster is about 5000 light years from Earth and is about 130 light years in diameter. The region contains NGC 2237, NGC 2238, NGC 2239, NGC 2244, and NGC 2246.
This is a Sirilic stack of 120 x 180 second exposures at 121 gain, 30 offset, and bin 2×2. The stack was calibrated with a master dark, no flats. I processed the data in PixInsight using my basic workflow and then applied Cosmic Clarity Sharpening to create the final image.
The Rosette Nebula is sometimes referred to as the Skull Nebula. This image shows the two eye sockets and the nose of the skull nicely.
The forecast for tonight does not look great so this is probably the last light I’ll be able to capture in 2024. Happy New Year all!!! Looking forward to 2025.
Next session I plan to swap out the duo-band filter for the SVBONY triband filter and hunt for some galaxies.
Clear skies…
I did a little tinkering with the HA and OIII in Pixel Math. Think it brought out a bit more depth and contrast especially in some of the dark clouds in the nebula.
