The Pelican nebula 2-pane mosaic with the Seestar S50

On two separate evenings the Pelican nebula was imaged with a Seestar S50, 50mm apochromatic GOTO smart telescope.

The first evening the Seestar S50 was sent to the Pelican nebula, which was imaged for 90 minutes. The resulting image on the Seestar showed what is commonly found, that the coordinates for the nebula do not truly represent the position of the object. The result was an image (and data set) that showed only part of the Pelican nebula.

Click on an image to get a closer view

Image from the Seestar

On the second evening, the sky map in Seestar was used to position the object exactly where it was wanted on the sensor. The object was imaged for 95 minutes

Image from the Seetstar

 

This yielded a satisfactory image but we already had an hour and a half's worth of data that covered much of the object. 

It was decided to combine both sets of data into a single data set, which in the end amounted to 3h 4.5m worth of 10s exposures.

The data were debayered, registered in maximum configuration, stacked, PCC processed, saturation processed and cropped in Siril.

The resulting image was denoised in GraXpert and post processed in the Gimp 2.10 with Starnet++.

As the LP filter of the Seestar S50 is a dualband filter it was possible to decompose the RGB image and recompose it as an HOO rendering of the Pelican nebula.

Pelican nebula RGB

Pelican nebula HOO

Steve Wainwright and Nicola Mackin