Hi All,
This rounds out the last of the fill-in images for the recent imaging runs. I can't say I've seen this target imaged often as its easily shadowed by its more glamorous neighbour. Top points for those who recognise the scene without looking at planetarium software. Its an interesting object in its own right.
Gum 85 - Nested Egg Nebula
Serpens, or the Serpent, is held by the Serpent Holder, Ophiuchus, and is the only constellation to consist of two separate parts - Serpens Caput (the head) and Serpens Cauda (the tail). The tail resides in a rich area of the Milky Way comprising of hydrogen and dust. One such feature is the emission nebulae fuelled by radiation from the open cluster NGC 6604. This cluster forms part of the Serpens OB2 association which comprises over 100 OB stars within a common age of five million years. The surrounding large emission nebulae known as Gum 85 (aka Sharpless 2-54) appears to harbour a bright egg shaped nebula. It is not clear from the scientific literature what is causing the remarkably intense glow of the egg. The nebula is approximately 6,200 light years away.
Single frame image, so still working on understanding the intricacies of PixInsight. Much of the finesse work was however still performed in Photoshop. I'm yet to get my head around Ha blends in PI. I've seen tutorials that explain it and its not very different to what I've done before in CCDStack and MaximDL. Still utilised PI for a few steps, in particular HDRtransformWavelet with its multi scale processing - am really enjoying what the function brings to an image, better still I'm incorporating the wavelet back in as a layer in PS so have complete control over where it needs to be applied to control aspects such as noise. Masks in PI seem overly complex yet logical in other ways. More to learn, that's for sure.
Anyway, I hope you enjoy it. All comments welcome.
Cheers