LBN144/SH2-90

AstroDMx Capture was used to capture 165 minutes of 5 minute RAW exposures of LBN144/SH2-90 and associated dark nebulae in Vulpecula with an SV605CC OSC camera, an Altair Starwave ASCENT 60ED doublet refractor with an 0.8 Reducer/flattener and a Pegasus FocusCube v2. An Altair 2” magnetic filter holder version 2 was placed in the optical train and contained an Altair quadband filter. The equipment was mounted on a Celestron AVX GOTO mount. An SVBONY SV165 guide-scope fitted with a QHY-5II-M guide camera was mounted on the imaging scope. The mount and focuser were controlled by AstroDMx Capture via an INDI server on the Linux imaging computer. PHD 2 was used for autoguiding and was running on a separate Linux computer.

33 light frames, 5 darks, 50 Flats, 50 dark-Flats and 50 Bias frames were captured.

The flats were captured using a device designed to avoid lateral light leakage and using a stack of 3mm thick acrylic white A5 sheets to evenly diffuse the light from a light frame and attenuate it sufficiently to get Flats of 1.5s duration.

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Capturing darks

The Flatfield equipment (Light panel and stack of light-attenuating acrylic A5 sheets)

Capturing Flats

The data were calibrated, stacked and part processed in PixInsight and further processed in GraXpert, Seti Astro Suite Pro and GIMP.

LBN144/SH2-90 

HR diagram of the stars in the image, produced by a new PixInsight HR script

Steve Wainwright and Nicola Mackin