Celestial hemisphere:  Northern  ·  Constellation: Cygnus (Cyg)  ·  Contains:  B168  ·  Cocoon Nebula  ·  HD207350  ·  HD207529  ·  HD207608  ·  HD207662  ·  HD207886  ·  HD207991  ·  HD208362  ·  HD208394  ·  HD208728  ·  IC 5146  ·  LBN 424  ·  LDN 1030  ·  LDN 1040  ·  LDN 1042  ·  LDN 1045  ·  LDN 1047  ·  LDN 1052  ·  LDN 1055  ·  Sh2-125  ·  VdB147
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IC5146 - Cocoon Nebula, Phil Hoppes
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IC5146 - Cocoon Nebula

Getting plate-solving status, please wait...
IC5146 - Cocoon Nebula, Phil Hoppes
Powered byPixInsight

IC5146 - Cocoon Nebula

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Description

This is IC5146 or the Cocoon Nebula.  I know it is a favorite of astrophotographers and now that I've photographed it I can see why.  It is really quite a nice object.  For friends and family I cropped it to just showing the nebula but I prefer this image that shows all of the dark nebula regions around the central core.

I have to say I'm loving my new portable setup with my AM5, RedCat51, ASI533MC Camera and my ASI Air + to drive it all.  It seriously blows me away that I can get images like this from such a small telescope in my back yard in Phoenix.  My skies are around Bortle 7-6 depending on the time of night.  I usually start at 7 and around midnight +/- 1 hour it is a solid Bortle 6.  I'm running the new Beta 2.0 firmware on my AA+ and I've already used the mosaic feature and wow, it makes it so easy.  This image is not a mosaic but some of my previous ones were.

On my RedCat51, I know that the ASI533MC camera is just on the bad side with respect to under-sampling but when I've taken the finished XISF or TIFF files what I see is my faintest and smallest stars are on the order of 4 to maybe 6 pixels.  The only camera that I can find actually that has pixels small enough to fall on the good side of sampling is the ASI183MC Pro.  In general for this portable setup I'm only interested in one shot color cameras as being portable I will usually be restricted to one nights shooting so doing a large array of filter shots precludes using a mono camera.  The ASI183MC FOV in area is almost identical to the ASI533MC so there is really no advantage gained by shifting to that camera.  The 183 suffers from amp glow while the 533 has none.  In the end I may pick up a ASI183MM Pro camera as it is a respectable camera for spectrographic work and I have an L200 and LowSpec spectrometer.  If I had the ASI183MM I could put a filter wheel on my setup and use it that way which in my back yard would be fine.  Then I would have that camera for higher resolution imaging with my RedCat51 and spectral work.  I will have to see. I've not used them much but plan on doing so now that my setup in Phoenix is finally coming together.

I post process using PixInsight and while still a complete novice I'm really liking that software.  I subscribe to Adam Blocks website and I've reviewed and used a lot of his tutorials.  I need to sharpen my pencil on narrow band image processing flows as that is pretty much exclusively what I am doing with my RedCat51 setup. I have a ZWO filter drawer so I can swap in a single filter.  This shot was done with the Optolong L-eNHance filter.  I have noticed on my shot and some others that I have done I don't seem to be getting some of the faint blue/green nebulosity that I think I should be seeing. The filter I used should pass some of that but I'm not seeing it.  I'm sure the problem is between the keyboard and the chair as I always like to say.  I need to do some deep dives into narrow band post processing on Adam's site and the 1000's of videos on YouTube.  If anyone has a favorite on this subject I'd love a link.

Enjoy and Clear Skies!

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IC5146 - Cocoon Nebula, Phil Hoppes