25 December 2019: a Christmas baby

Or actually maybe more still a foetus, as the Soul nebula is often seen as a foetus or a little bear. Imagination! I’ve never seen a Soul in it: how does a soul look like anyhow?

The frames were taken last week Tuesday, in horrible conditions: high clouds, fog, and tons of moisture. Frames were whitened out by the fog, and all street lighting reflecting on the fog.

Soul Nebula December 2019

The image is a mosaic, about 6000×7400 pixels. More then 7 panels were composed with APP to create it. However, due to the fog, soo many gradients were present, I really had to get all tricks out of my sleeves to get a decent picture. It was processed with all parameters in APP at max (Normalisation, blending) and also cropped the outer edges which could not be salvaged. Material used was: Nikon D750, no filters, EQ8; Esprit120, 400mm guidelens with an ASI290MM

Also to be seen at Astrobin

M106 added more data

I could add 116 shots of 120 seconds, in an attempt to bring out the outer spiral arms more clear. The total integration time is now over 8 hours and this is the LRGB combination below (all shot from Meldert, Belgium). Click on the picture to go to Astrobin.

These 4 nights were more or less used, there was some high-altitude clouds passing by which not always affect the photometer (click for a larger image)

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