About a week ago Andy01 posted a great image in the “big boys'” Deep Space images forum showing the nebula RCW 46 / Gum 26 and its background emission field. It seems that the nebula is only very seldom imaged with (now) just two instances in Astrobin. So I guess that it is mostly overlooked by viewers and imagers alike. That being so I wondered if it could be seen “visually” in near real time through the lens of a camera. The accompanying couple of images show that it can be done. Of course the result only a pale reflection of the images obtained with conventional long exposure astro-imaging. Even so it is gratifying to find that something can be seen.
The first image is a screenshot from the viewing laptop. The second is a crop after some small PS enhancement and rotated 180 degrees to match the orientation in Andy01's image.
Apparently the nebula is about 20,000 light years away. That being so, the brightest part as seen in these EAA images is about 47 light years across. And given that that is only part of the whole nebula it's clear that this is not an insignificant object.
Vixen R200SS, SW AZ-EQ6, ZWO ASI294MC Pro, SharpCap live stack of 30 seconds unguided exposures.
wow, it might be big, but it looks so small from here.
I just plugged it into Stellarium and used a combo of the ASI2600MC and a Bintel GSO RC16-A f/8 Astrograph...