We've previously tried even 50 hours unbinned, trying to get more detail in the family of faint bow shocks to the east of the Helix, with only partial success.
Here we've taken 34 hours of 2x2 binned H-alpha, plus another 4 hours of unbinned for the bright core details.
The routinely imaged "eyebrow" about half-way out, arcing from 9 to 12 o'clock came out well. It looks like a breaking ocean wave, with a hollow cave-like three-dimensional extension toward 9 o'clock.
Far beyond the eyebrow, we can see that the much fainter main chevron-shaped bow-shock toward 9 o'clock has many smaller shock fronts within it.
Toward 10 o'clock, there is a pair of very fine and sharp, large, concentric round-nosed bow shocks, which have rarely, if ever, been imaged before.
In a long arc from about 10 o'clock to 12 o'clock is another almost implausibly sharp and thin bow shock.
The more familiar bright blunt conical extension toward 7 o'clock is shown to have a lot of internal detail and texture, vaguely reminiscent of fox fur.
The extensions toward 4 o'clock is seen to be much more flocculent, not shocked.
We're kinda chuffed, because we don't think we've seen a deeper rendition of these fine outer bow shocks. The 2x2 binning exercise was worthwhile.
Field is a tight 3 panel mosaic 43 min arc wide, north up. Aspen CG16M at -30C on 20" PlaneWave CDK on MI-750 fork. Acquisition using our own custom software. Processing with our GoodLook 64.
Well the original version you guys did a while ago was already mighty good and deep but comparing the two, this has widened the field a little, added some body to the main neb and consolidated some of the fainter/finer features you reveal back then. Do you plan to do another panel to the right?..there are some faint extensions to reveal on that side too
Wow, you guys! That is incredible! I've never seen those extensions before. And, 20" -- sheesh!
I've been gathering data on this baby in bi-colour over the last couple of months, as well, but, I doubt I'm going to get anywhere near showing so much detail, let alone the image scale, lol.
