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Tuesday, November 2, 2010

IC 63, a ghostly figure


A nebula in a Halloween theme... 


IC 63, an emission nebula in constellation Cassiopeia.
Natural color composition from the emission of ionized elements, R=80%Hydrogen+20%Sulfur, G=100%Oxygen and B=85%Oxygen+15%Hydrogen to compensate otherwise missing H-beta emission. This composition is very close to a visual spectrum.

IC 63 is a combination of emission and reflection nebulae. Since this is a narrow band image, reflection component is not get captured due the broad band nature of it. Instead there is an ionized Oxygen, O-III, in this image and it can be seen as a Blue.
Nebula is next to the Gamma Cassiopeiae, a bright, mag. 2.47, star in middle of the "W" asterism.
This star is just outside of the frame. It's above upper Right corner, some glow from it can be seen in an image.

Since there is only Two hours of H-a, I'll shoot more lights for this in near future.



IC 63 in HST-palette, (HST=Hubble Space Telescope)
from the emission of ionized elements, R=Sulfur, G=Hydrogen and B=Oxygen.
There was almost no emission in S-II channel.

Technical details:

Processing work flow:
Image acquisition, MaxiDL v5.07.
Stacked and calibrated in CCDStack.
Levels, curves and color combine in PS CS3.

Telescope, Meade LX200 GPS 12" @ f5
Camera, QHY9 Guiding, SXV-AO @ 8,5Hz
Image Scale, 0,75 arcseconds/pixel
Exposures H-alpha 6x1200s, binned 1x1
O-III 1x1200s, binned 3x3
S-II 2z1200s, binned 3x3

An experimental starless image to show the actual nebula

Looks like an open mouth man with a frozen nose...





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