Back in 2015 we did the top left quarter of this image (in H-alpha and OIII), and commented on the striking resemblance to the "nose" of a bottle-nosed dolphin.
Here we've completed a
4 panel mosaic of the entire Gourd nebula, all in OIII.
Aspen CG16M on 20" PlaneWave CDK. 3nM Astrodon filter. Processing using GoodLook 64. Final 50% reduction in image size in CS5.
The whole nebula does look like a gourd fruit, but it still has strong echoes of an ice sculpture of a dolphin broaching the surface.
Weather has been hot, with appalling seeing almost all the time, but it doesn't look like it's about to get any better. Perhaps a workable approach is to do half-nights in Spring and half-nights in Autumn, rather than whole nights in Summer, but interestingly, the final image with the 20" in a Central Western NSW heat wave is not
too different to the image from the Atacama with a six inch scope! As the estate agent said, "Location, Location, Aperture".
Best,
M & T