Cave Nebula Area - Color & Narrowband Filter Blend
The Cave Nebula is known as Sharpless 155 and as Caldwell C9. It is a dim area of nebulosity near Cepheus maybe 4 degrees away from M52 and the Bubble Nebula. The "cave" is the bright red/blue object just above center, and I think the cave part comes from the dark area just above. The small blue reflection nebula on the lower left is LNB524. Kenneth Drake comments on many of the objects shown here in the 2006 DSLR image below (scroll down).
The image above combines about 3.5 hours exposure with two cameras and two telescopes. It consists of 75 minutes of narrowband H-alpha using the SBIG ST-8300 CCD camera with the FW8-8300 filter wheel, Astrodon narrowband 36mm filter, the Takahashi FSQ-85 telescope with reducer. I blended the H-alpha into the red color at 25%. The color data is sourced from the QHY8 "one shot color" CCD camera with the Takahashi TOA 130 Telescope (a 5" APO refractor) with reducer, color exposures (30 * 5 minutes = 150 minutes total color). AP 900GTO mount. I used MaximDL to acquire and process flat and dark frames, Registar to align, Photoshop CS5 with a little HDR toning to process from there. Other narrowband pictures with this combination, and more info, are at this link. Other astronomy pictures from the Fall 2011 trip are here. The H-alpha image is show below, as is a "Hubble Palette" version of this object using only narrowband data.
HAS member Kenneth "Drako" Drake offered the following, which is reproduced here with his permission: "The field is swamped with nebulosity and dark clouds. I cannot say that I have ever seen the Cave Nebula but I found a reference to the Wolf's Cave (LDN1218 & Bernes 44). In your image, the huge dark complex takes up the upper left corner while the denser small area surrounded by SH2-155 seems to be YDM56. The large hook shaped dark cloud below and left appears to be Bernes 43 - also known as LDN 1215-16. At the left side of your image are many small dark clouds and Harbig Haro objects clustered together. Fine image there Dick." (Thanks Kenneth!)
Image: Combination of approximately 16 images from night of 11/19/2006 and 33 images from night of 11/20/2006. All exposures were 4 minutes. Totals: 49x4 = 196 minutes or 3 hours 16 minutes. My current image processing workflow is here. This one was a challenge to process as it had a lot of interesting colors just about everywhere. Equipment: Canon EOS 20Da (unmodified), Takahashi TOA 130 (a 5" APO refractor) with reducer, guided with SBIG STV, Losmandy G-11 mount.
Copyright © 2006, 2011 by Dick Locke. All Rights Reserved.
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