The moon is half full but otherwise a break in the clouds and smoke allowed me to get out to the telescope. Calm air helped to give nice guiding and after tossing some early frames with not so dark background and four or five of the lowest scoring frames in Deep Sky Stacker left me with 3hr 12 minutes of 240 sec. sub frame data to integrate. Again as I have been doing lately I used the 2x drizzle function in stacking for cleaner resolution after downscaling in Photoshop.

4000 light years away and around 15 light years across, this is a star nursery area showing both emission and reflection nebula characteristics.

The Iris Nebula is a hauntingly beautiful target. I was able to get well over three hours total of 240 second sub frames. Stacked with “2x drizzle” and fresh calibration flat frames along with bias frames. Ran two different post processing runs and this one was the one I liked best. As always when you click the image below it will open up the full resolution image.

A fun and gorgeous object to image! I ran 180 second subs on the fairly bright target for almost 2 and 1/2 hours to get this result. Near new moon on a nice summer night. Stacking with “2x drizzle” brought more detail I think than previous attempts. 

Another go at this nebula that is hard to pull out of the starfield with my current setup. The “Wizard” profile is not easily discerned in this image and the distinguishing feature of the pointed hat is not evident here to be honest. In any case I ran 240 second subs with nearly 3 hours of integration to produce this version. Pushing the post processing as far as I could makes for some funky star artifacts. One near full field and one rotated crop image:

A very low  target in the Southern sky from my location, the Lagoon Nebula is rather bright so I went with 180 second exposures at 800 asa. I stacked something like 38 subs or about 1.9 hours of data. Tracking was unusually poor with steady periodic swings. Some of this may be from the low physical orientation of the mount and some may be from the atmosphere although the sky in general seemed to have stable air. In another move that I have not done much if at all in this blog, I used the “2x drizzle” function while stacking the sub exposures. This gives an output with double the resolution. After initial conversion to 16 bit the image scale is reduced back to normal scale and the effect is a sharper image to start off with.

Half of the “Heart and Soul Nebula” in this frame from a 3 hour run on a dark sky night. 

From the internet….. https://www.constellation-guide.com/soul-nebula/  :

“The Soul Nebula (Westerhout 5) is an emission nebula located in the constellation Cassiopeia. It forms a famous pair known as the Heart and Soul with the neighbouring Heart Nebula (IC 1805). The Soul Nebula is sometimes also known as the Embryo Nebula or IC 1848, which is a designation used for the open star cluster embedded within the nebula.

The Heart and Soul Nebulae complex spans an area about 300 light years across and is a vast star-forming region illuminated by the light of the young stars surrounded by star-forming clouds of dust and gas. The two large clouds are separated by only 2.5 degrees and physically connected by a bridge of gas. The stars in the region are less than a few million years old and are only beginning their life. For comparison, our Sun has been around for almost 5 billion years.”