M78 and Some Barnards Loop - A 2 hour Snapshot

[Astrobdlbug]

Evening,

last night Monday 2nd January was forecast to be clear for a time before the cloud and rain tracked in from the west. Unfortuately early evening some persistent low cloud stopped me starting imaging  early and I waited until 9pm when clouds dissipated. This left me with a short 3 hour window before more cloud was due. I decided to try OSC with IDAS D2 for a broadband view of M78 and some Barnards Loop - was all very close to an 82% illuminated moon, so lacking good contrast in subs and also big gradient to process out. I had a few niggles with the mount guiding - I think when I tweaked the worm/gear when it was sub-zero I've gone too far and as I said at the time I probably need to loosen the adjustment as my tracking was up in 1.6-1.8rms and I usually expect 0.6-0.9 - jet stream was overhead as well which also doesn't help, so I ended up with about 2.5hrs of subs but removed a few due to tracking and one exceptionally bright satellite trail, so ended up processing 68 120s subs.

 

Anyway, all stacked in APP and  used the APP light polution removal tool which worked wonders, I think it works better than DBE in PI- but thats me, I then used the new Spectrophotometric Color Calibration (SPCC) tool in PI followed by BlurXT and NoiseXT and used GHS to stretch , bit of LHE and star reduction - I processed this as a single image, not starless + stars.

 

Dont have a huge amount of detail in M78, but think that it is still recognisable and I do like a bit of Barnards Loop - such an iconic arc of dust and gas surrounding Orion.

 

Anyway - I'm glad I made the effort to grab a few hours before the rain and cloud took hold - here hoping we get some clear skies later in the month,

 

Bryan