Iris Nebula NGC7023
September 6th, 2010
It’s been a while since my last update, after the rush of objects imaged in Cygnus we got hit by apparently never ending cloudy skies, plus a week on holiday. All of which resulted in me getting nothing down. However I’m back now and with a nice run of clear skies towards the end of last week coinciding with a waning moon.
My target of choice was the Iris nebula in Cepheus and the original plan was to continue with widefield imaging to capture the dust clouds which surround this object, unfortunately when I had finished and stacked my 32 images there was no sign of those structures to be seen. I guess a combination of my cameras lack of sensitivity combined with a half moon on that night ruined that plan.
With another couple of clear night predicted I went back to the 250mm reflector for another go and the nebula itself, I have had this object on my ‘to image’ list for so long that I wasn’t going to give up. Here is the result :
Imaging Equipment
- Orion Optics Europa 250mm Reflector
- Baader MPCC
- Canon EOS 1000D (unmodified)
- Astronomic CLS CCD Filter
Guiding and Mount
- Vixen A70LF Refractor
- Modified Philips SPC900NC Webcam
- IR/UV Cut Filter
- 0.6x Focal Reducer
- Celestron CGEM Mount
Exposures
- 42 x 10 minutes
- 21 x bias
- 11 x dark
- 21 x flat
The images were calibrated and debayered in Iris then aligned, stacked and processed in Pixinsight.
