Most renditions of the Cat's Paw Nebula emphasise the "paw print", but I wanted to show the beautiful dark ripples throughout the nebula and the interesting but faint background.
Here's my attempt with Ha data taken in my back yard this past month:
1526 x 1125 version (50%)
3053 x 2250 version (100%)
This a 2x2 mosaic with each panel consisting of 20 x 60 min subs (bottom-left panel has 26 x 60 min) for a total of 86 hours, processed using PixInSight. Data was captured across 17 nights of August, averaging 5.1 hours/night (ranging from 1 to 7 hours/night).
Equipment: GSO RC8 scope, SX AO-LF + Lodestar guiding, SBIG STF-8300M camera binned 2x2, Astrodon 3 nm Ha filter, and Skywatcher NEQ6 mount.
Interestingly, recent research from June this year suggests that this stellar nursery could be a mini-starbust ("a concentrated area of extremely rapid star formation usually only seen in distant galaxies"). It's apparently even more prolific than the Orion Nebula - with 200,000 Suns worth of star-creating material, and tens of thousands of new stars already formed. The research shows that most of the star creation is currently happening in the dark regions between the pads of the "paw".
http://www.skyandtelescope.com/news/210829901.html
http://www.space.com/21443-cats-paw-...starburst.html
http://www.cfa.harvard.edu/news/2013/pr201315.html