Iris Nebula

We finally got decent weather for astrophotography last night. The next two nights look good as well. I’m going to work on the Iris Nebula, C4.

I gave it pretty much the whole night, from astro dusk to astro dawn, with 45 second exposures, gain of 60. I used the astro filter, which is the first time I’ve done that for a nebula. I guess because it’s a reflection nebula, not an emission nebula, this makes more sense. Here is the initial stacking from Wormwood.

Going through megastack, I deleted 31 subs at the end due to the Iris going behind a tree. Very strangely, there was one sub at the end that didn’t have a tree in the frame. I have no idea how that could have happened. Overall, I deleted 72 subs, due to trees, camera shaking, clouds, and satellites. I kept one sub where an airplane went through. The dwarf software flagged that frame, so hopefully it won’t get stacked. I couldn’t resist keeping it — it’s the first time I’ve caught an airplane.

The schedule for this run was 21:46 to 04:46. Since the last 31 subs were pointing at a tree, that means we were able to track Iris until about 04:22. Adjusting four minutes per day, we should stop the run at about 04:18 tomorrow. Astro dawn is 04:50, so maybe we’ll grab the Heart Nebula for a little while before then.

1.5 hours later, megastack finished. Here is StellarStudio “auto” of the results so far: