Robins Egg Nebula
28-Nov-2017
NGC 1360 is known as the Robin's Egg Nebula, primarily due to its blue hue from strong oxygen-III emissions. It is a diffuse planetary nebula 1794 light years away. Presented is a narrowband image with H-alpha emissions mapped to red, and OIII emissions mapped to both green and blue (HOO palette).
Image:
- 47x 600s Ha bin2x2
- 50x 600s OIII bin2x2
- 22x 60s Red bin1x1
- 32x 60s Green bin1x1
- 20x 60s Blue bin1x1
Total exposure 17 hours 24 minutes.
Hardware:
- Celestron 11" Edge HD
- Celestrong 0.7x EdgeHD focal reducer
- Skywatcher EQ8 Pro mount
- QSI 683-ws8 Camera @ -15°C
- Astronomik 6nm Ha, 6nm OII, Deep Sky RGB filters
- Starlight Xpress Active Optics
- 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 10 nights, 0% to 50% moon.
Software:
- Planning & camera alignment with Aladin 9
- Captured with AstroArt 6
- Guiding with PHD2 + PHD_Dither
- FocusLock live focusing
- CCDInspector: Image analysis & rejection
- CCDStack 2+: Calibrate, align, stack, combine RGB.
- Photoshop CC: Shadows/highlights, combine Ha+OII+RGB, noise reduction, curves, adjust colour balance, saturation, crop.