A break from wind and rain

A most welcome break in the weather came last night, about 7 hours worth of clear sky with no wind or rain the whole time, this meant I could capture the OIII and SII data for the Flame and Horsehead nebulae. This time however when I processed the Image, instead of putting the Ha, OIII and SII into the Green, Blue and Red channels in Photoshop that would give you the Hubble palette, I put the Ha, OIII and SII into the Red, Green and Blue channels respectively. This gives a much more natural colour to the image, and without the messing about with selective colour.

If you look closely at the bright star Alnitak, you can see the reflections of the microlenses on the ZWO asi1600mm Pro sensor, this is due to ZWO, the camera manufacturer – sourcing the sensors from Panasonic, Panasonic saved money and did not place any AR ( Anti – Reflective ) coatings on the sensor cover glass. so if the field of view has a bright star in it this pattern appears. 

The above picture comes from the web, so mine is not an isolated example.

I also had the time to image the Christmas Tree nebula in Ha, located in Monoceros, NGC2264 also includes the Fox Fur nebula and the Cone nebula, also in the image is Hubble’s variable nebula, NGC2261 is a reflection nebula ( lit by nearby star R Monocerotis ) that changes its appearance over weeks and months, One explanation for the variability is that dense clouds of dust near the star R Monocerotis periodically block the illumination from the star.This casts a temporary shadow on the nearly clouds, it looks somewhat like a comet.