Collecting  Photons

North is below.

Objects:             A fantastic sculture of gas and dust. VdB 27 is the yellowish reflection nebula at the bottom, CED 30 glows in blue scattered light at the top. 

Constellation:     Taurus

Coordinates of field center (J2000): 4h 20m 43s; +27° 56'

Notes: LDN 1495 is the long dark filament that frame the image on the right. Here, strong evidences of star formation have been recently demonstrated. Within the dark filament near the lower right corner, is visible a tiny reddish nebula catalogued as HH 157 showing Herbig Haro objects embedded in the cloud. I am grateful to Sakib Rasool for these infos on the area.

Telescope and camera: ASA 10', f 3.6; TEC 140, f 7.2, SBIG STL 11000.

Exposure: ASA: L 29x10'; R 25x10'; G 21x8'; B 31x10'. TEC: L 28x10'. About 21.6 hrs total.

Date: five nights on October 2011.

Software used: acquisition, CCDsoft, FocusMax, The Sky VI. Calibration; registration and stacking: CCDstack, Registar; processing: PixInsight 1.7, Photoshop CS3. 

Processing notes: VdB 141 itself is pretty bright, so no major problems there. The background nebula instead, is very, very faint and to complicate things the star field is particularly rich. The balance between stars and dust is the major problem here. One interesting bit about this image is that half of the colour data has been acquired after I moved the telescope to the dark remote observatory. So I had a chance of comparing the data obtained under two very different conditions: a dark site and a suburban sky. Not surprisingly the dark sky produced much better images both in terms of the background noise, and in terms of the superior sky transparency.

Copyright © 2011 by Gimmi Ratto. (November 26, 2011)