Object info

The Cocoon Nebula (IC 5146) lies at a distance of about 4000 light years in the constellation Cygnus.
Inside the nebula a star forming region is developing a new cluster of stars.

The large star at the centre of the nebula has blown a hole in the nebula and is supposed to be responsible for exciting the hydrogen into emitting Ha light.
The dark nebula to the right of the Cocoon nebula is known as Barnard 168

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 18 darks, 20 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. Unfortunately this was not possible due to the position of the object in the sky at this time of the year.

Previous versions

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