Another new image that is a new capture of an object I have photographed before using my DSLR. I'm really enjoying seeing the difference both im the sharpness of images with my astrocamera, as well as the effects I am able to achieve using different blends of the narrowband images in the red, green and blue colour channels.

The choice of target over these two nights was mostly dictated by what objects were visible at the time. The target I really want to capture isn't visible above the roof line of my house early enough in the evening yet, so I need to wait another few weeks before going after that.

As I have implied above, this is another image composed of narrowband captures to isolate the emission wavelengths of sulphur, hydrogen and oxygen which results in an image that is often described as a 'false colour' image, because it isn't representative from a colour point of view of what you would see by direct observation if the object were bright enough for your eyes to detect.

I have had a lot of fun trying new techniques for processing this object, and whilst I was originally hoping to add a bit more exposure time to this in an effort to reduce the noise in the image, the forecast for the next couple of weeks isn't looking very good for clear skies. I think I've managed to achieve a result that's pretty close to what I had imagined before starting to capture this object again.

For anyone curious about the name of this nebula, the 'trunk' is actually the dark dusty area towards the bottom right of the image. It's located in the constellation Cepheus and is also known by the name IC 1396. It lies approximately 2400 light years from Earth, and if you'd like to know any more about this object you can follow this link to its Wikipedia page.

You can view this image in the WorldWideTelescope by clicking here.

The number of different ways that I've attempted to process this image, and the wildly different results that I've achieved in doing so set me thinking that it would be fun to make my raw data available for download to see what any website visitors might come up with by doing their own processing of my data. Leave a comment on the page if this would be of any interest and I'll look into how I might share the data, and also how I might make a page available to showcase the results of other people's image processing.