NGC 896, in the constellation of Cassiopeia, is a very small part of an emission nebula known as IC 1805, the Heart Nebula, which extends off to the left of this picture. It is about 7500 light years away in the Perseus arm of the Galaxy, so the brighter stars here are probably in the foreground. The nebula itself is largely excited by hot blue stars outside this picture.
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This picture was made from pictures taken with CLS, Hα, and OIII filters. With each filter I made 10 exposures each of 1 minute. Each exposure was enhanced by subtraction of a dark frame and non-linear stretch in star-mx7, and then each set was stacked in RegiStax, which was then used to align the three pictures. The final picture was assembled by the LRGB technique in Photoshop using the OIII in both the green and the blue channels, and the CLS image as the L component. The OIII image was quite faint so that the predominent colour of the nebula is red. Date and Time: 14th October 2010 19:57 to 21:05 UT Camera: MX716 with Astronomik CLS, Hα, and OIII filters Telescope: LX200 with 0.33 focal reducer Capture: star_mx7. 10 frames at 60 seconds at each wavelength Processing: star_mx7. Dark subtraction, non-linear stretch 25, background. RegiStax. Stacked 10 frames at each wavelength. The three resulting pictures were then aligned and exported as bmp files. Photoshop. Combination as LRGB image. PhotoImpact. Gamma 1.3, contrast 7, Focus Magic 2,100 |
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