My 17 hour exposure of the Flaming Star Nebula in natural color

Image from i.redditmedia.com and submitted by Idontlikecock
image showing My 17 hour exposure of the Flaming Star Nebula in natural color

Idontlikecock on March 25th, 2018 at 15:03 UTC »

I have three other versions of this image (HaRGB, LHaRGB, and a starless variant) of this image due to just having some fun and enjoying the different ways to process NBLRGB data sets. You can find all 4 versions of the image on the link above. I wish Reddit let me post albums! Imgur compression is just too bad to use.

Thanks for looking!

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Is star AE Aurigae on fire? No. Even though AE Aurigae is named the flaming star, the surrounding nebula IC 405 is named the Flaming Star Nebula, and the region appears to have the color of fire, there is no fire. Fire, typically defined as the rapid molecular acquisition of oxygen, happens only when sufficient oxygen is present and is not important in such high-energy, low-oxygen environments such as stars. The material that appears as smoke is mostly interstellar hydrogen, but does contain smoke-like dark filaments of carbon-rich dust grains. The bright star AE Aurigae, visible toward the right near the nebula's center, is so hot it is blue, emitting light so energetic it knocks electrons away from surrounding gas. When a proton recaptures an electron, light is emitted, as seen in the surrounding emission nebula. Pictured above, the Flaming Star nebula lies about 1,500 light years distant, spans about 5 light years, and is visible with a small telescope toward the constellation of the Charioteer (Auriga).

Source: APOD

Equipment:

305mm F/3.8 Riccardi-Honders Astrograph by Astro-Physics

SBIG STX 16803

Astro-Physics AP-1600 mount

Lodestar guiding camera

Astrodon filters

Acquisition

Luminance - 24x600"

Red – 15x600"

Green – 18x600"

Blue – 16x600"

Total integration time - 17.5 hours

Taken from the Deep Sky West Observatory in Rowe, New Mexico. A Bortle 2 site.

Processing

BPP

Combine flats, darks, and bias

R/G/B processing

Linear Fit Combine into RGB image Dynamic Background Extraction TGV is each from followed by MMT Masked Stretch

L processing

Deconvolution Histogram Transformation LHE with modified amounts and different wavelet layers as masks Unsharp Mask Dark Structure Enhance

LRGB Processing

Combine L + RGB images Curves on RGB/K and along with saturation Some star reduction and trying to make the larger stars look better with their halo

saniity9 on March 25th, 2018 at 16:02 UTC »

Wallpaper material right there. Its so beautiful. Amazing work!

racife on March 25th, 2018 at 16:33 UTC »

I'm not familiar with astrophotography, but how do you expose 17 hours and not be overexposed by sunlight?