Nebulosity in the Auriga Region

This image showcases much of the nebulosity in the Auriga region in its natural colors. On the left is the flaming star nebula, an emission-reflection nebulae ionized by the star at its core. The blue parts are reflection, and the red parts are emission. At top center lies the tadpole nebula, a strong emission nebula. On the left are the spider and fly nebulae, two complex regions, of dark nebula, dust, emission nebulae, and reflection nebulae. Below theses two nebula is an open star cluster. Scroll down to the bottom to see the annotated version of this image.

Image:

Equipment:

• Nikon D800
• Nikon 300mm prime lens
• Sky-Watcher Star Adventurer
• Star Adventurer Tripod
• Bahintov Mask
• Intervalometer
• Stellarium
• All Sky Plate Solver
• Nina
• Nikonhacker software

Acquisition:

• ISO 800, f/4.0
• Taken from a bortle 2 zone during the new moon.
• Taken on 12/2, 12/4, 12/5, 12/6
• 381 x 3′ light frames (19.05 hours) used
• 200 total flat frames
• 62 dark frames
• 200 bias frames (used from 1 month ago)

Processing

• Dynamic crop to remove stacking artifacts
• Combine RGB image
• DBE on RGB
• PCC on RGB image
• TGV denoise on RGB image targeting chrominance and luminance
• MMT denoise on RGB image targeting RGB chrominance and luminance
• Arcsinh Stretch -> Masked stretch of RGB image
• starnet + pixelmath to boost nebulosity
• starnet, MMT, LHE, and curves to enhance nebulosity and saturation
• star reduction (two rounds)
• MMT sharpening
• LHE on starless image
• slight histogram and curves transformation

Annotated Image: