California and a dumbbell 🔭

I finally had the chance to acquire data to finish up some astrophotography projects. Specifically I needed Sulfur II data for an image of the California nebula. For this project I wanted to try a color mapping I have not tried before. I wanted to use Hydrogen Alpha in the red channel, mix Ha and SII data for the green channel, and use SII in the blue channel.

This took me 10 nights of data collection from home, since I can only image from 30° to 45° elevation, and it was great to finally get enough data to finalize the image:

California nebula H(SH)S colored
The California Nebula in Perseus. I have tried to observe this target visually many times, but it has eluded me so far. Thankfully it is much easier to get a good image, especially with narrowband filters. This image is 2.5 hours of Ha data, and 5 hours of SII data. In the future I would like to try a mosaic to get the full nebula, with the same color scheme.


I also was at a very dark sky location (bortle 2), and got an image of the Dumbbell nebula (M 27). It was very windy, so I only got approximately 20 minutes of good RGB data, and 10 minutes of good luminance data. With little light pollution that data still resulted in an image I am quite happy with.

M27 dumbbell nebula
The Dumbbell nebula (Messier 27) in Vulpecula. I recommend opening the full version to really take in the full star field and the nebula. There seems to be more faint details around the nebula, so I hope to revisit this and get more and possibly longer exposures.

I have got several more projects in the works, hope to get them finished soon as well. Until then, clear skies!

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Jonas

Hacker and developer that loves to explore topics related to informatics, software engineering, mathematics, graphics, games, science.

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