Snake Nebula B72

[furgle (Adam)]

The Snake Nebula (also known as Barnard 72) is a small but S-shaped dust lane that snakes out in front of the Milky Way star clouds.



This is a test shot with minimal processing from a night of observatory automation software testing.


Better resolution here



Image Integration:

• 33x 90s red
• 31x 90s green
• 34x 90s blue

Total exposure 2 hours 27 minutes.


Hardware:

• Skywatcher Black Diamond 120ED
• SkyWatcher EQ8 Pro Mount
• QSI 683-ws8 Camera @ -15°C
• Astronomik Deep Sky RGB filters
• Starlight Xpress Lodestar X2 Autoguider
• Innovations Foresight On Axis Guider

Location:

• Orange zone in Brisbane, Australia. (Bortle 7)

Software:

• Planning & camera alignment with The SkyX Pro
• Captured with AstroArt 6
• Guiding with PHD2 + PHD_Dither
• CCDStack 2+: Calibrate, align, stack.
• PixInsight: Background neutralization, linear fit, histogram stretch, saturation.

[multiweb (Marc)]

It looks very good Adam. A great part of the sky. If you have a browse around off field there are a lot of other interesting dark nebulae. I did a wide field (middle right) on this area a while ago. Gotta love milkyway season. So much stuff to play with at any FL.

[Geoff45 (Geoff)]

Nice field, good star colours. Could be improved by a bit more contrast between the nebula and the star field.

[Placidus (Mike and Trish)]

An old favourite of mine, not photographed in the last ten years, so getting all nostalgic.

I agree with Geoff that the stars are excellent but the nebula could be a tiny bit more contrasty.

Very well done.

Mike