The area captured in this image lies in Serpens Cauda (the tail of the Snake), within the Serpens - Aquila Rift in the Milky Way, and contains many dark nebula, reflection nebula, Herbig-Haro objects and star forming regions.
I was drawn to this area after noticing the object vdb123 in Stellarium and being unfamiliar with this catalogue decided to do some research. I now know that a person by the name of Sidney van den Bergh
published a paper in 1966 which contained a catalogue of bright nebula. The area is also replete with dark nebulae many of which have been catalogued by Dobashi in the "Atlas and Catalog of Dark Clouds" (
Dobashi et al. 2005). Further research showed that it was an interesting area to image so I figured that I would give it a shot.
The image is comprised of 22 hours of data through Red, Green and Blue Astronomik filters. No separate luminance was captured but I did create a pseudo luminance by separately integrating the RGB masters in Pixinsight. Combining this with the processed RGB did help in bringing the blue luminosity into the foreground.
The image was technically challenging to process and pixel peepers will no doubt notice this (so no pixel peeping - Ok
). However, I'm pleased with the way that it has landed so I'm happy to let this one out of the bag and into the public space
Link to Astrobin post here.
Click on image in Astrobin for larger resolution.
CS,
Rodney
Edit: Added in a couple of support images. One is a screen shot from Stellarium showing the location of the object in the Milky Way. The other is an annotated version showing the main objects in the image.