Wiruna Lobster

[Retrograde]

Hi all,

I managed to capture 3 hours of unfiltered OSC exposures on the Lobster Nebula NGC 6357 at Wiruna during SPSP. It was my first time out under truly dark skies in 2 years.

My original plan was to supplement it with some narrowband data from back home in Sydney but given that I was unable to fit the whole object in at my focal length I'm not sure it's really worth it. Perhaps a bit of a further camera rotation would've allowed better framing? (but as I had to do the rotation manually it was rather time consuming & time was limited)

This was my first go at stacking in Siril and it seems to work pretty well. :)

Scope: Skywatcher MN190
Camera: ZWO ASI2600mc
Exposure 52 x 3.5min sub-exposures.

Higher res available here: Astrobin NGC 6357 (https://www.astrobin.com/bfoif7/)

Comments/critiques always welcome. Thanks for looking.

[strongmanmike]

Great shot of this magnificent nebula Pete, well done :thumbsup:

Superb colouring too. Along with the nearby and slightly closer (5500Lyrs vs 8800Lyrs) Cats Paw, there is very little colour variation to be had within the nebula, so while some subtle colour variation can be enhanced in each nebula, because of their great distance, in the plane of the Milky Way and the resulting heavy dust extinction, both are probably most accurately displayed as essentially mostly red/orange, like you have here :thumbsup:

This is my favourite (https://noirlab.edu/public/images/noirlab2221a/zoomable/) rendering of it, done with the Dark Energy Camera on the 4-meter Blanco Telescope...looks pretty similar to yours actually :D ..great to zoom right in on too! :)

Mike

[Retrograde]

Thank-you very much Mike, much appreciated.
Good to see a professional image for comparison too. :)

[Dave882]

Great shot! Highly detailed and great natural colour. Nice control of the brighter regions too. Well done!

[Retrograde]

Thanks Dave! :)