Object info

The Heart Nebula, IC1805 lies about 7500 light years away from our planet, and is located in the Perseus arm of our galaxy.
The nebula has a diameter of approx. 200 light years and can be found in the constellation Cassiopeia.

New stars are born in the center of this nebula, forming a small star cluster known as Melotte 15.

The bright knot of nebulosity at upper right is known as NGC896.

Processing

DSLRFocus was used for focussing. All separate frames were calibrated, aligned and stacked in ImagesPlus 2.8. "Dynamic Background Extraction" (DBE) was done in PixInsight. Photoshop CS2 was used for further processing - curves adjustment, levels adjustment, etc. The image was calibrated using 40 darks, 25 flats and 30 bias frames.

Comments

Not happy with this version due to the relatively low amount of subframes, resulting in a rather noisy image. In order to get more out of this red object with an unmodified DSLR, a lot more subframes are needed.

Heavy noise reduction was needed to get a "presentable" image, which had some severe effects on the overall image quality.
The moon was way past half full when taking this image, so we have some additional colorful light pollution gradients too.

Previous versions

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