Trifid Nebula in HaLRGB
03-Aug-2016
Almost everyone has a go at imaging the Trifid nebula, which is composed of 3 different type of nebulae; emission, reflection, and absorption. When I noticed some faint red glow in the background, I decided to try integrating some long hydrogen emission line frames to see if I could get any structure out of it. I'm quite happy with the resulting background structures!
Image:
- 31x 600s Luminance bin1x1 + 15 flat + 50x dark + 120x bias
- 19x 300s Red bin2x2 + 12 flat + 50x dark + 120x bias
- 19x 300s Green bin2x2 + 12 flat + 50x dark + 120x bias
- 19x 300s Blue bin2x2 + 12 flat + 50x dark + 120x bias
- 31x 1200s H-alpha bin1x1 + 20 flat + 50x dark + 120x bias
Total exposure 20 hours 15 minutes.
Hardware:
- Skywatcher Black Diamond ED120
- SkyWatcher EQ8 Pro Mount
- QSI 683-ws8 Camera @ -15°C
- Astronomik Typ 2c LRGB, 6nm Ha 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 4 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, deconvolution, combine RGB.
- Photoshop CC: Merge Lum+Ha as luminance, curves, high pass filter, merge HaL+RGB, minimum filter, color adjustment, saturation.