4 Panel mosiac~ Blue Horsehead (Dawn Lowry)

4 Panel mosiac~ Blue Horsehead

Blue Horsehead nebulaIs simply amazing structure that lies north of the more often photographed region Rho Ophiuchi. To find the Blue Horsehead Nebula from there, hop North to the next bright star in Scorpius, This star is also known as "Jabbah" meaning "forehead" of the scorpion. The eye of the horse head is Jabbah ~ the main star illuminating the Blue Horsehead Nebula. It's formal name is IC 4592.Probably my favorite aspect of the nebula is the smaller nebula that lies near the portion of the head that would be considered an ear. This reflection nebula is illuminated by two big giant blue stars.The most unique aspect is the dust, that constitutes the neck of the horse made of dark interstellar clouds. Capturing the dust is what makes this so difficult of a target. It requires very dark skies or extensive imaging time.This particular target is a four panel mosaic., 2 x 2 paneling. I.e. imaged each panel every night in order to balance the lighting for the panels. I took this across the five separate nights which would've included separate flats and then combined everything together per panel. I then drizzled the integration because the sampling was a little bit under. I then combined the panels and APP and the remainder of the processing was done in PixInsight. This target took multiple nights to image and took multiple nights to edit. I'm very proud of the results and I hope you enjoy my work.Panel 1,3 and 4 have 3 1/2 hours and panel to has 4 1/2 hours available data. To yield 15 hours of total data taken with a QHY 168C color camera utilizing my red cat 51 in Bortle one skies of Texas at the ever amazing Shirley Ranch south of Marfa, Tx.This was image this past April on our trip for nine days under dark skies.Lot of work to pack up everything that you have Astro photography world wise loaded in a trailer and drive 24 hours to a dark side. And then spend the next nine nights in absolute Astro photography heaven. On the target I perform the following processes,

Crop, channel separate, Channel registration, channel combination. Luminance extraction, Color calibration Noise exterminator. Histogram transformation. LRGB combination after noise exterminator to Lum~StarNet to to remove the stars. LHE, curves adjustment, mask generation for a specific targeting of structures, noise exterminator for sharpening and more noise reduction, exponential transformation, pixel math to replace the stars. Color saturation and brightness to the stars prior to combination. Additional color saturation and curves tools for the entire image. Dark structure enhance and ICC color profiling.

Cloudy Nights

	Distinct awarded users	Total awarded images
Image of the day
Top picks
Top pick nominations

	Image of the day	Top pick	Top pick nominations	Total submitted
Deep sky
Solar system
Extremely wide field
Star trails
Northern lights
Noctilucent clouds
Landscape
Artificial satellite

	Image of the day	Top pick	Top pick nominations	Total submitted
Backyard
Traveller
Own remote observatory
Amateur hosting facility
Public amaeteur data
Professional, scientific grade data
Mix of multiple sources
Other
Unknown

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Status	Advanced success
Started	...
PixInsight job	SVL071FV5P02WJ17U01EPBEF0BO9WIP6
PixInsight queue size	n/a
PixInsight stage	TASK_LOG

RA (center)	16h21m13s.33
RA (top/left)	16h02m38s.36
RA (top/right)	16h40m02s.65
RA (bottom/right)	16h39m10s.90
RA (bottom/left)	16h03m11s.92

Dec (center)	-20°10′04″.9
Dec (top/left)	-22°59′55″.9
Dec (top/right)	-22°56′57″.2
Dec (bottom/right)	-17°12′45″.2
Dec (bottom/left)	-17°17′14″.1

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