SH2-199 - The Soul Turned Sideways

[JimFox]

I had some issues a few weeks ago with my Astro Rig, so I wanted to test it out. Setting it up in my 6x8 foot patio with a 6 foot fence is not ideal. Add to that the Bortle 9 skies and some possible less then ideal seeing with thin smoke drifting down from LA county down to Orange County in SoCal. Also I have a very narrow window from the NW to N that I can image, objects have to be at least 35 degrees up. There is also a huge tree just to the right of N which gives me a small little window from NE to E.

None of that's ideal, but when the clouds finally decide to go away after almost nonstop action for the last 2 months, you take what you can get. So SH2-199 the Soul Nebula was one of 2 objects I spent time imaging over a 3 day period, including 4 images I grabbed of it from Dec 30th that I had imaged with the Gain cranked up to 300 (normal Gain for my camera is 100).

When I framed it up in my Askar Fra500, I should have rotated the orientation of the camera 90 degrees so the nebula would fit in better, but I thought I was just doing some testing and the conditions were so bad, I didn't want to hassle with it. So a bit of it gets snipped off, but it's not too noticeable I don't think.

Each day I was stacking and stretching, the data kept looking better, and each day I started to wish I had rotated the camera, but at this point I was committed to the orientation I had chosen. I didn't want to have to do a second set of calibration frames. I should add some more time on this, but I think it looks pretty decent for now. I processed this as HOO with NarrowbandNormalization in Pixinsight.

63 Lights @ 600 secs with Antlia ALP-T filter
30 Flats
30 Dark Flats
30 Darks

ASI2600mc Pro - Astro Camera
Askar Fra500 - Scope
ZWO AM5 - Mount
ZWO EAF
ASIAir Plus - Astro Controller
Processed in Pixinsight
BlurXterminator
NoiseXterminator
StarXterminator
GradiationCorrection
Finished in Photoshop

All comments are welcome,

Jim

 

[Jameel Hyder]

Interesting combination of dense pink and wispy blues in this.

And the software has a lot of terminators

 

[AlanLichty]

Excellent result given all the caveats around what you are able to shoot from your patio.

 

[Mike Lewis]

Jim,

Nice job on this one, I have a newfound appreciation of this target after just finishing imaging it myself. Not sure I understand about the orientation - looks like it is perfectly aligned with the long axis on the sensor? Or perhaps this is you having cropped it already? I guess that must be it as your sensor size and focal length should have captured it all if properly aligned otherwise. You still got the majority of it in the frame though i would say. Good Hα and Oiii signal, obviously no Sii to add in. I think that does add but harder to do with OSC unless you have the right pair of dual band filters...I continue to be impressed at how far your post processing skills have come from your early days. Really nice job on this one!

ML

 

[JimFox]

Hey Mike,

Thanks so much! What's amazing to me is simply the quality of images that can be captured in Bortle 9 skies. When I look at the sky here, it's not black at all, it's light gray. And I can't see any stars at all except for Capella and a couple of planets. It's just amazing how advanced Astrophotography has come.

As to the alignment, I have always seen a Bison in the shape of the Soul Nebula. I don't see a soul.... I have captured this probably 4 or 5 times and I always rotate it to the left 90 degrees so that it looks like a Bison. In this case, I rotated it even more, I rotated it 180 degrees, so that the head of the bison is on the bottom. I thought it actually had more of a snowman feel this way.

I did crop this. It was the orientation just 180 degrees rotated. So the empty space was to the left and the right. I cropped that off so instead of it being a Horizontal format like my sensor is, it got cropped to vertical.

Thanks again.