The Flame nebula

NGC2024 The Flame Nebula.
Within the constellation of Orion theHunter lies the Flame nebula next to the bright star Alnitak at a
distance of about 1,200 light years. The sky conditions on this particular evening was very poor with mist, fog and heavy light pollution to contend with. Stars was only visable down to about magnitude 3.5 so only narrow band imaging was posable. I was using my ten inch F4.8 reflector, an Atik 383L mono CCD camera and PHD auto guiding . I captured five minute sub frames with matching dark frames and combined them with flat field frames to reduce the effect of vignetting in the final image. In one of the images I used some old RGB colour data and combined it with new narrow band luminance data. The total exposure times was 60 minutes using a H Alpha filter, 30 minutes using a S11 filter and 30 minutes using an O111 filter. The colour data using the narrow band filters was H Alpha for green ,S11 for red and O111 for the blue, [ the Hubble palette ].

RGB

Narrowband

Narrowband + RGB

NGC2174, the Monkey head nebula

NGC2174. This is commonly named the Monkey head nebula. This bright emission nebula lies in the constellation of Orion at a distance of about 6,400 light years. I took this image under heavily light polluted clear sky conditions with stars only visible down to magnitude 4. I was using my ten inch F 4.8 reflector, an Atik 383L mono ccd camera with PHD auto guiding. I captured five minute sub frames with matching dark frames and combined them with flat field frames to reduce the effect of vignetting in the final image. The hubble palette
was used for the image colour data using narrow band filters, S11 for red, HA for green and O111 for the blue. The total exposure times were 60 minutes using a S11 filter. 80 minutes using a H Alpha filter and 30 minutes using an O111 filter.

The Soap Bubble Nebula

This cropped image is a combination of old and new data with the extra addition of two hours of H Alpha luminance. This makes a total H Alpha exposure time of three hours.

The Soap Bubble nebula

Comparison of the normal and negative image in which the soap bubble nebula is very clearly seen