The image for this week comes from fellow PAIG forumite Harry Page – with yet another superb deep-sky offering – this time it’s the beautiful Iris nebula with its surrounding brown dusty clouds. This region of Cepheus is another one of my happy hunting grounds and I clearly remember grabbing some early Iris images with the original Hyperstar and the little H9C camera – they were nowhere near as good as this image of course 🙂
Harry provided the following data for his image.
1 Luminance 610 minutes
2 RGB 80 minutes each
3) IDAS light-pollution filter
4) 14″ Newtonian at F#3.75 with an Orion Optics corrector
5) Processed in Pixinsight and captured in AA5
6) All subs 10 minutes unguided ( new TDM on scope )
7) Camera Starlight Xpress H35
The Pixinsight processing included DBE to remove gradients , histogram stretch , hdr wavelets , some noise reduction and finally a bit of a saturation boost.
You can see a higher resolution version of Harry’s Iris nebula image at the address below, I strongly recommend you take a look, the higher resolution makes a huge difference!
http://www.harrysastroshed.com/Image%20html/Iris2011.html
