Cocoon nebula in H-alpha (Ian Dixon)

Cocoon nebula in H-alpha

Hello friends!

Last October was a good time to image the Cocoon nebula. This is one that I have worked on before, but this time I was limited to my backyard and wanted to have at it with narrow band. As I am now getting more acclimated to shooting images with my new(ish) mono 2600, and also wanted to test out my new Antila 4.5 nm H-alpha filter this was a good opportunity.

I have 3 hours plus in integration, and the seeing was quite good (despite this data being derived from my light polluted backyard).

I think the central star in this image stands out nicely. I also tried to get some representation of the dark nebulae that seems to trail out from the main nebula. The so-called dark nebula Barnard 168 is apparent in this image as a dark lane that surrounds the cluster and projects outward to the top left corner from IC5146 itself.

Calibration:

30 darks
30 flats
30 bias

The target: Paraphrasing from Sky Safari "The Cocoon Nebula, cataloged as IC 5146, is an emission nebula and star cluster located about 4,000 light years away in the constellation Cygnus. It is located near the star Pi Cygni, the open cluster NGC 7209 in Lacerta, and the bright open cluster M 39.IC 5146 shines at magnitude 7.2, and has an apparent diameter of 12', which is equivalent to a span of 15 light years.""Like other stellar nurseries, the Cocoon Nebula holds a bright red emission nebula, blue reflection nebulae, and dark absorption nebulae. Inside the Cocoon Nebula is a newly developing cluster of stars. The massive central star, which formed about 100,000 years ago, now provides the energy source for much of the emitted and reflected light from this nebula".

Thanks for looking.
Ian

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Status	Advanced success
Started	...
PixInsight job	0X2L8DCSHQ80OAC2TCFUWOKE6FHNAHGL
PixInsight queue size	n/a
PixInsight stage	TASK_LOG

RA (center)	21h52m17s.800
RA (top/left)	21h49m19s.719
RA (top/right)	21h51m17s.391
RA (bottom/right)	21h55m13s.995
RA (bottom/left)	21h53m19s.678

Dec (center)	+47°23′30″.36
Dec (top/left)	+47°44′07″.20
Dec (top/right)	+46°48′27″.80
Dec (bottom/right)	+47°02′33″.27
Dec (bottom/left)	+47°58′27″.47

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