Saturday 16 December 2017

IC5146 The Cocoon nebula.

This reflection emission nebula lies in the constellation of Cygnus the swan. Unfortunately the clouds on this particular evening were closing in,  I only had a total of about one hour and ten minutes of imaging time; therefore these images have more noise in them than some of my previous images.  I captured five minute sub frames with matching dark frame and combined them with flat field frames to reduce the effect of vignetting in the final image. The telescope I was using was my ten inch F4.8 reflector, a Vixen Atlux mount, an Atik 383L mono CCD camera and PHD auto guiding. The exposure times were 35 minutes using a H-alpha filter , ten minutes using an SII filter, ten minutes using an OIII filter and fifteen minutes using a blue filter.

Bi-colour image

Narrowband

Hubble Palette

RGB Narrowband composite

This final image of the Cocoon nebula has additional exposure of three and a half hours using a H-alpha filter. A total exposure time of four hours and forty minutes.