vdB 15 (Jonathan Piques)

vdB 15

Revision title: Wider field

This beautiful little reflection nebula is located in Camelopardalis, about 3,000 light years away. The primary blue component is from the illumination of two supergiant stars, HD 21291 and HD 21389, and are an an area of new star formation. What's kind of unique about this one is there is significantly more red going on than most reflection nebulae, owing to Ha laced throughout the entire structure, which gives the entire object a pinkish hue. You don't see a ton of images of this object, particularly cropped close like this, so hopefully this is a relatively novel framing for astrobin.

Processing this was, fortunately, not a major ordeal. I wanted to highlight both the extended structure as well as the interesting, pink-tinged color. On the structural component, this required a fair amount of integration time, followed by careful stretching and application of HDRMT (somewhat attenuated) to show all the wispy elements of the dust. For the red piece, I shot some Ha and honestly when I added it to the RGB image, it didn't add much to what you see here. If you saw the wider cropped version of this (which I didn't like), there was a strong Ha element lurking just on the edge of the frame but I just didn't have a wide enough field of view to grab it all. So I left out the Ha and just made sure my RGB stretch involved ArcSinhStretch so I didn't lose color. From there it was just basic application of luminance and a teeny bit of star reduction and then basic curves adjustments. I normally like pretty contrasty images but this I deliberately made it less contrasty so the dust has a chance to stand out.

As always, commentary and criticisms are welcome.

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Title: Wider field

Description: I haven't been happy with this image since I posted it: something just wasn't right. So I went back and revisited the texture and colors and framing and pretty much everything. While I still don't love it, I do think pulling the camera back wider adds something, and I fixed some color issues with the stars I wasn't thrilled with: generally tried to make everything a little more natural.

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Status	Advanced success
Started	...
PixInsight job	VZOFLFN51H30MFQIDUZKJWD8SYKAGSMJ
PixInsight queue size	n/a
PixInsight stage	TASK_LOG

RA (center)	03h30m01s.348
RA (top/left)	03h34m46s.655
RA (top/right)	03h25m42s.428
RA (bottom/right)	03h25m21s.781
RA (bottom/left)	03h34m14s.270

Dec (center)	+58°53′30″.40
Dec (top/left)	+59°13′51″.34
Dec (top/right)	+59°19′00″.47
Dec (bottom/right)	+58°32′28″.85
Dec (bottom/left)	+58°27′24″.30

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vdB 15

Revision title: Wider field

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Revision title: Wider field

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Revision title: Wider field

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