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The Squid and The Flying Bat

Otherwise known as OU4 and Sh2-129 in the constellation Cepheus lying at a distance of approximately 2300 light years. Both emission Nebulae, the Flying Bat mainly composed mainly of Hydrogen emission and the Squid’s emission composed of double ionized oxygen. An extremely faint object The Squid Nebula was discovered in 2011 by French Astro-imager Nicolas Outters

 

Captured recently in Narrowband (H-Alpha and OIII) and Broadband using a QHY600 60 Megapixel Full Frame Monochrome CMOS camera mounted on a Takahashi 130 FSQ, courtesy of QHYCCD.

 

This setup is available immediately for people wanting to subscribe to Grand Mesa Observatory's system 1.

grandmesaobservatory.com/equipment-rentals.

In this Bi Color version (HOO) the H-Alpha is mapped to the red channel and OIII is mapped to the green and blue channel. The raw data was preprocessed using Pixinsight, the stars were then removed using a tool in Photoshop called "StarXTerminator and the stars were later replaced with the more naturally colored stars from the RGB data.

 

Taken bin 2x2 over 17 nights between September and October 2021 for a total acquisition time of 51 hours.

 

View in High Resolution

Astrobin: www.astrobin.com/g8zawj/

Technical Details

Captured and processed by: Terry Hancock

Location: GrandMesaObservatory.com Purdy Mesa, Colorado

HA 1330 min, 266 x 300 sec

OIII 1430 min, 286 x 300 sec

LUM 88 min, 44 x 120 sec

RED 86 min, 43 x 120 sec

GREEN 78 min, 39 x 120 sec

BLUE 58 min, 29 x 120 sec

Narrowband Filters by Chroma

Camera: QHY600 Monochrome CMOS Photographic version

Gain 26, Offset 76 in Read Mode Photographic 16 bit, bin 2x2

Calibrated with Dark, Dark/Flat Frames

Optics: Walter Holloway's Takahashi FSQ 130 APO Refractor @ F5

Mount: Paramount ME

Image Scale:2.39 arcsec/pix

Image Acquisition software Maxim DL6, Pre Processing in Pixinsight Post Processed in Photoshop CC

 

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Uploaded on January 14, 2022