Sunday, Oct 13, 2024

I had seen images showing faint gas and dust clouds surrounding the nebula, and I wanted to make these visible using the RASA at f/2.2, focusing primarily on the RGB data. In the end, I accumulated nearly 25.5 hours of exposure time, with about 20.5 hours dedicated to RGB and 5 hours to H-alpha. The images were taken from my backyard on the outskirts of the city under Bortle 5 conditions The processing was more challenging than expected because, despite the long exposure time, everything was still quite faint overall. I blended the H-alpha data very subtly to keep the RGB look. I was very pleased that the dust clouds became visible in the lower right of the image, as well as the two reflection nebulae VdB 153 (bottom center) and GN 22 12.3 (top center). Sh2-140 also stood out nicely with its shockwave, along with the gas cloud Sh2-145 (left).