Celestial hemisphere:  Northern  ·  Constellation: Cassiopeia (Cas)  ·  Contains:  IC 1795  ·  NGC 896
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IC1795 The Fish Head Nebula, niteman1946
IC1795 The Fish Head Nebula
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IC1795 The Fish Head Nebula

Getting plate-solving status, please wait...
IC1795 The Fish Head Nebula, niteman1946
IC1795 The Fish Head Nebula
Powered byPixInsight

IC1795 The Fish Head Nebula

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Description

To some, this nebula looks like the head of a fish. However, this colorful cosmic portrait really features glowing gas and obscuring dust clouds in IC 1795, a star forming region in the northern constellation Cassiopeia. The nebula's colors were created by adopting the Hubble false-color palette for mapping narrow emission from oxygen, hydrogen, and sulfur atoms to blue, green and red colors.
Not far on the sky from the famous Double Star Cluster in Perseus, IC 1795 is itself located next to IC 1805, the Heart Nebula, as part of a complex of star forming regions that lie at the edge of a large molecular cloud. Located just over 6,000 light-years away, the larger star forming complex sprawls along the Perseus spiral arm of our Milky Way Galaxy. At that distance, this picture would span about 35 light-years from left to right. [Source: APOD (with some edits)].

CAPTURE Information: 
The image was captured with the iOptron CEM120 mount , the venerable Meade 12"LX200 SCT, and my new QHY295m Pro mono cmos camera at F7.16 (2182mm FL).
Image subs were taken through Astronomik's narrowband filters of Ha, SII and OIII.

IMAGE information -- 2021
This is a combination of Ha, OIII and SII.
Ha : 33 subs (2.75 hr) on Dec 6th.
OIII : 20 subs (1.67 hr) on Dec 6th.
SII : 20 subs (1.67 hr) on Dec 6th. 

All exposures were at 5 minutes (300s) each, 1x1 bin and -10C.

Each subs of Ha, SII and OIII were individually integrated, then merged, and lastly combined. The three assemblies then created the Hubble Palette, using PixelMath and the following “SHO” formula:
Red = SII
Grn = Ha
Blu = OIII

Luminance was created using only subs from the Ha filter.
Processing was done with PixInsight, following (for the most part) kayronjm's tutorial of Feb. 24th from several years back. Credit also goes to Rick Stevenson’s Color Mask Script and Christopher Gomez’s tutorial.

COMMENTS:
I had previously done this target in December of 2013 and 2020. 

The 2020 one was a  two-panel mosaic, and came out pretty good.  This presentation is of a single panel, like most of my images.  This one was a "shake down" voyage with my new QHY294m Pro mono cmos camera.  One toe-stump was that I had generated the Bias, Flats and Darks at Gain of 1600.  However I forgot to set the Ha, OIII and SII to that value.  So ther are all at Gain of 1087.  There's a lot to learn with this new camera, but it's more similar in operation to the previous Atik than I was expecting.  Hopefully I'll get better at it.

The process using Pixinsight include the starnet tool.  This tool will (almost completely) remove stars from the in-process image.  By having the stars out of the way, it is much easier to massage the image than with stars in place.  I tested two methods of re-introducing the stars.  One was to added the starnet removed stars back into the color image.  The other method was to leave them out and just use the mono stars in the Lum image when doing the LRGB Combination process in Pixinsight.  Comparing the two shows little, if any, difference.  The presented image is of the latter.

Lastly, I'm hoping to add so more photons as soon as the weather permits.

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IC1795 The Fish Head Nebula, niteman1946