Cats Paw Nebula - Adam Lundie - Eatons Hill Observatory

Cats Paw Nebula

19-Jul-2018
Cats Paw Nebula thumbnail
Cats Paw Nebula
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.

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