It has been a long time since I have shot a dark nebula, but with F/2 optics under dark skies, I had to give at least one a try! After three nights of exposure, I am quite happy with how it turned out. Now I will go back to emission nebulae ASAP.
Whenever I process images, I'm always hyper-aware of looking out for blobs in my photos. There are a lot of spurious reflection nebulae in this photo, and my eye was drawn to this one random one for its circular shape:
@Nico Carver Did a little digging and found a paper on a photometric survey of the stars inside the ngc7023 molecular cloud. Star 68 in the
paper is dead on the coordinates, but it is a F-Type yellow-white dwarf star. This doesn't quite match up with the subtle blue color of the nebula, but either way it is a cool feature to note!
I also would like to mention the mount that I'm using here at the observatory because it is not commonly seen here in the States. I have been running all of my images with the
JTW trident mount, which is a very beefy friction drive equatorial mount with a 165lbs payload capacity. The friction drives mean that if there is too much pressure on the gear, it will slip. So there is zero risk to damaging any equipment with pier impacts, which has been great for peace of mind. Apart from this, the mount has tracked perfectly every night at around 0.3" RMS. It uses the OnStep open-source controller for the gears, so there is no annoying software to deal with (looking at you TheSkyX). And with the price of $7500, I don't see a compelling reason to buy any other mount for an observatory setting for a large payload. I love seeing anything that brings premium performance at a lower cost because astronomy deserves to be less expensive.
In the next week or two I will be adding two more scopes to this mount to create a tandem rig, which I am very excited for. This mount barely has to break a sweat with the current payload that is on it!
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