Tagged: Head - Adam Lundie - Eatons Hill Observatory

IC 2118 (also known as Witch Head Nebula due to its shape) is an extremely faint reflection nebula believed to be an ancient supernova remnant or gas cloud illuminated by nearby supergiant star Rigel in the constellation of Orion.

Adjacent to the bright blue supergiant star Alnitak shines the ionised hydrogen of the Flame and Horsehead nebulae.

Shown in this animation is the movement of Ceres over 8 hours, on the night of 4th June 2019, as it passed by the outer edge of IC4592, the Blue Horsehead Nebula.

After switching from a Celestron CGEM DX to a Skywatcher EQ8 Pro, and from off-axis guiding to on-axis guiding I am very happy with the results. This is a 25 minute test shot of the Horsehead Nebula.

I decided to take advantage of the only clear night for over a week to play with some new toys: an Astronomik 6nm Hα filter, and a Starlight Xpress adaptive optics unit. After learning how to calibrate and use the AO, I settled on the Horsehead Nebula as my target.

Often I like to see how an image is processed from start to finished. Presented in this animation are the main processing steps in sequence from my image of the Horsehead Nebula