Cats Paw Nebula
19-Jul-2018
Shaped like a cats paw, NGC 6334 is a stellar nursery and emission nebula 5,500 light years away in the constellation Scorpius. This image 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.
Image:
- 72x 600s Sulphur-II 6nm
- 97x 600s Hydrogen-alpha 6nm
- 73x 600s Oxygen-III 6nm
Total integration 40 hours 20 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 8 nights.
Software:
- Planning & camera alignment with Aladin 10
- Captured with TheSkyX Professional
- Guiding with PHD2
- FocusLock live focusing
- PixInsight: Calibration, sub-frame analysis, registration, integration, dynamic background extraction, noise reduction, histogram transformation, HDR multiscale transform, curves, star reduction, rotation, crop.