Skull and Crossbones Nebula
12-Feb-2019
The Skull & Crossbones Nebula is an active star-forming region approximately 20,000 light years away.
This image is a false colour representation of hydrogen-alpha, sulfur-II and oxygen-III emission-line clouds, mapped to red, green, and blue respectively. An emission line will appear in a spectrum if the source emits specific wavelengths of radiation. This emission occurs when an atom, element or molecule in an excited state returns to a configuration of lower energy.
Image:
- 45x 600s Sulfur-II
- 57x 600s Hydrogen-alpha
- 51x 600s Oxygen-III
Total integration 27 hours.
Hardware:
- Skywatcher Black Diamond 120ED
- Skywatcher EQ8 Pro mount
- QSI 683-ws8 Camera @ -15°C
- Astronomik 6nm SHO filters
- Starlight Xpress Lodestar X2 Autoguider
- Innovations Foresight On Axis Guider
- Starlight Instruments Focus Boss II
Location:
- Orange zone in Brisbane, Australia. (Bortle 7)
- Exposed for 7 nights between 11-Jan-2019 and 27-Jan-2019
Software:
- Planning & camera alignment with Aladin 10
- Captured with TheSkyX Professional
- Guiding with PHD2
- FocusLock live focusing
- PixInsight: calibrate, align, stack, dynamic background extraction, deconvolution, denoise, curves, histogram, pixel match channel combination, background neutralization, crop.