The Rho Ophiuchi cloud complex is a dark nebula of gas and dust that is located 1° south of the star ρ Ophiuchi of the constellation Ophiuchus. At an estimated distance of 131 ± 3 parsecs, it is one of the closest star-forming regions to the Solar System.
Image:
Equipment/software:
- Nikon D90
- Nikon 85mm f1.4
- Sky-Watcher Star Adventurer
- Star Adventurer tripod
- Intervalometer
- Bahintov mask
- Laptop
- Stellarium
- All Sky plate solver
Acquisition:
- Bortle 2 for 2 panels, bortle 3/4 for the other 2
- 4 panel mosaic – around 2-3 hours per frame
- 3 minute exposures
- total exposure time was 9.6 hours
- ISO 800, lens stopped down to F4
Processing:
- Used WBPP to stack each panel
- platesolved each panel with distortion parameters
- aligned using mosaic by coordinates
- pixel math to get rid of some problematic bright stars
- Gradient Merge Mosaic to make the mosaic
- Deconvolution
- EZ soft stretch
- MLT denoise, then MLT sharpen
- Star reduction
- Another strech, this time manually done
- curves with masks to bring out h-alpha
- more curves
Annotated Image:
