Ara Dragons NGC6188
04-Jul-2018
NGC 6188 is a large emission nebula of compressed molecular clouds 4,000 light years away in the constellation Ara. This image spans around 3 full moons and comprises of emission line data for Sulfur-II, Hydrogen-alpha and Oxygen-III, mapped to red, green, and blue respectively.
The hydrogen signal has been attenuated to show it's interaction with the SII and OIII clouds. Although it is invisible to the naked eye, if visible this cloud would be mostly deep red, with some blue around the open star cluster NGC 6193 in the centre of the image. This cloud complex is also known as the fighting dragons of Ara.
This image is also my first attempt at using PixInsight for the entire data processing session.
Image:
- 81x 600s Sulphur-II 6nm
- 73x 600s Hydrogen-alpha 6nm
- 90x 600s Oxygen-III 6nm
Total integration 40 hours 40 minutes.
Hardware:
- Skywatcher Black Diamond 80ED
- Skywatcher EQ8 Pro mount
- QSI 683-ws8 Camera @ -15°C
- Astronomik 6nm Hα, OIII, SII filters
- Starlight Xpress Lodestar X2 Autoguider
- Innovations Foresight On Axis Guider
- Starlight Instruments Focus Boss II
Location:
- Orange zone in Brisbane, Australia. (Bortle 7)
- Imaged over 6 nights.
Software:
- Planning & camera alignment with Aladin 10
- Captured with AstroArt 6
- Guiding with PHD2 + PHD_Dither
- FocusLock live focusing
- PixInsight: Calibration, sub-frame analysis, registration, integration, dynamic background extraction, noise reduction, masked stretch, linear fit, contrast, RGB combination, background neutralisation, SCNR green, deconvolution, color balance, saturation, unsharp mask.