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FROM THE OBSERVATORY · 03-Jul-2022

Little Gem Nebula NGC6818

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Little Gem Nebula NGC6818
Perhaps too small of an object for amateur equipment to tease out any details, I decided to try my luck on the Little Gem Nebula. NGC 6818 is roughly 6000 light-years away from Earth. The glow of the cloud is just over half a light-year across.
BEHIND THE IMAGE

Notes from the session

When stars like the Sun are near end of life, they send their outer layers into space to create glowing clouds of gas, a planetary nebulae. This ejection of mass is uneven, and planetary nebulae can have complex shapes. NGC 6818 shows knotty filament-like structures and distinct layers of material, with a bright and enclosed central bubble surrounded by a larger, more diffuse cloud.

Scientists believe that the stellar wind from the central star propels the outflowing material, forming the elongated shape of NGC 6818. As this stellar wind moves through the slower-moving cloud it creates particularly bright spots in the bubble's outer layers.

Source: Wikipedia

Image:

54x 600s 6nm H-α
49x 600s 6nm O-III


Total integration 8 hours 35 minutes. Focal length: 2800mm

Hardware:
Celestron 11" Edge HD
Skywatcher EQ8-Rh mount
QSI 683-ws8 Camera @ -15°C
Astronomik 6nm H-α, 6nm O-III filters
Starlight Xpress Lodestar X2 Autoguider
Innovations Foresight ONAG
Starlight Instruments Feather Touch Focuser



Location:
Exposed over 5 nights between 30th June to 7th August 2021
Orange zone in Brisbane, Australia. (Bortle 7)



Software:
Planning & camera alignment with Aladin 10
Captured with TheSkyX Professional
Guiding with PHD2
PixInsight: Calibrate, align, integrate, dymanic background extraction, HOO combination, noise reduction, HDR multiscale transform, histogram, curves, crop.