Witch Head Nebula

I have been aiming to photograph this for some time now but always another galaxy or nebula got in the way. Finally I dedicated the night of 29 December 29, 2016 to targeting the old witch. This is 15 separate 90 second images using a 300mm f2.8 lens on a Canon 7D Mk II. RAW files were converted to TIFF in Adobe Photoshop, stacked in ImagesPlus, then stretched in RNC-stretch (clarkvision.com-free download Windows). I inverted the Witch so you could see her profile easier.

I happened to pick a night when massive amounts of red airglow were in the night skies, easily seen with the naked eye. When advancing through the individal frames quickly on can see the airglow transiting across the Witch almost like clouds which accounts for the red hue and mitigating the blue color of the nebula.

Well I reprocessed this image and brought out considerably more detail. I just do not have enough subs to capture all of the witch's hat.

Nice!

Very nice. You got a lot more out of it.

Very nice! What are you using for tracking?

I use the Astrotrac TT320X AG portable tracker, a wonderful equatorial tracker. It is easy to set up, especially if you have the TW 3100 wedge. It will track for two hours, then needs to be reset where you can start tracking again.