South of Orion - NGC1999
08-Jan-2018
NGC 1999 is a dusty blue reflection nebula, embedded in the hydrogen dust cloud of Orion. This narrow band enhanced image shows the light blue NGC 1999 at the center, with the edge of M42 (the Orion Nebula) at the far right. Also shown in the image is the waterfall nebula, the magenta shock wave between NGC 1999 and M42.
Image:
- 45x 300s Luminance
- 35x 150s Red
- 36x 150s Green
- 34x 150s Blue
- 33x 600s H-alpha
- 52x 300s Sulfur-II
Total exposure 17 hours 48 minutes.
Hardware:
- Skywatcher Black Diamond 80ED
- Skywatcher EQ8 Pro mount
- QSI 683-ws8 Camera @ -15°C
- Astronomik Typ 2c Luminance, Deep Sky RGB, 6nm H-alpha, 6nm 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 5 nights, new 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.
- Pixinsight 1.8: Crop, deconvolution, TGV denoise, MMT denoise, MT star reduction, histogram stretch, local histogram enhancement, MLT sharpen, linear fit RGB, color calibration, pixel math to add HII to luminance, LRGB combination, pixel math to add SII to blue channel, saturation.