Ceres passing by the Blue Horsehead Nebula

[furgle]

https://observatory.site/gallery/Ceres_passing_by_the_Blue_Horsehead _Nebula_20190622.gif


Shown in this animation is the movement of Ceres over 8 hours, on the night of 4th June 2019, as it passed by the outer edge of IC4592, the Blue Horsehead Nebula.


I spent quite a bit of time planning and waiting for this shot, both on nights Ceres was near the nebula, and later in the month, so I could cancel it out in the image stack. I wanted to show the movement in a wide-field color animation, rather than the usual high zoom black & white.


With a diameter of 945km, the dwarf planet Ceres is the largest object in the asteroid belt between Mars and Jupiter.

Image:



64x 300s Luminance
25x 150s Red
26x 150s Green
32x 150s Blue

Total integration 8 hours 48 minutes.
Hardware:



Skywatcher Black Diamond 80ED
Skywatcher EQ8 Pro mount
QSI 683-ws8 Camera @ -15°C
Astronomik Luminance, Deep Sky RGB filters
Starlight Xpress Lodestar X2 Autoguider
Starlight Xpress Active Optics
Innovations Foresight On Axis Guider
Starlight Instruments Focus Boss II

Location:



Exposed during 4 nights between 4th June and 12th June 2019.
Orange zone in Brisbane, Australia. (Bortle 7)

[Imme]

Now that’s astronomy....well done.

Kinda puts all the rest of us that take pretty pictures in our place doesn’t it!

Even as a stand alone picture the colours are great. My hats off to you mate, great work

[gb44]

Great stuff! Have you done Pluto?

GlennB

[Dennis]

Excellent work.

Cheers

Dennis

[Retrograde]

That is very cool!

[furgle]

Thank you.






I have once, when it came within 1.5 degrees of Mars. It's barely a couple of pixels at that scale though: https://observatory.site/astrophotography/Mars_and_Pluto_Conjunction/