The Rosette Nebula | NGC 2237

I decided to take advantage of the new moon, drag my telescope, and do some astrophotography last night...even with the time change and losing an hour of sleep. I'd say the bit of sleepiness today was worth it to get back into Astro and get this shot of my first time imaging this nebula!

 

The Rosette Nebula (NGC 2237) is 65 light-years across and 5,500 light-years away from Earth. It is visible in the sky between the constellations Gemini and Orion, in the head of the constellation Monoceros.

 

Equipment:

SkyWatcher EQ6-R

Nikkor 500mm f/4 P AI-S at f/5.6

Sony a7SIII (unmodified)

ZWO 30mm Guide Scope

GPCAM2 Mono Camera

 

Acquisition:

Taos, NM: my front yard - Bortle 3

32 x 180" for 1 hour, 33 min, and 31 sec exposure time.

5 dark frames

15 flats frames

15 bias frames

Guided

 

Software:

SharpCap

PHD2

DeepSkyStacker

PixInsight

Photoshop

Lightroom

 

I polar aligned my mount using SharpCap Pro. My Sony a7SIII and adapted Nikkor 500mm f/4 P AI-S were mounted on an ADM vixen rail and secured to the SkyWatcher EQ6-R mount. The guide scope/camera was attached to the camera's hot shoe. I used PHD2 to autogude during the imaging session. DeepSkyStacker was used to combine all frames, and the outputted TIFF file was brought into PixInsight using: STF, Cropping, Dynamic Background Extraction, BlurXTerminator, plate solving, color correction, NoiseXTerminator and then the DSO was separated from the stars, and both files processed and stretched separately and then recombined using PixelMath. That file was brought into Lightroom for Metadata and EXIF tags, light post-processing, and cropping to the final image.

Done