These are our observations in Perseus

• NGC 1499 in Perseus

  With this single colour shot of 500 second exposure Richard has captured a large portion of the California nebula (NGC 1499). Unfortunately it clouded over before he could get any additional frames.

  

  Image Details

  • Telescope: AG14 Orion F 3.8
  • Camera: FLI Microline Camera

  Richard Weatherley - (2 February 2021).

• Messier 76 in Perseus

  Image Courtesy of David Davies, Cambridge, UK. For more images from David please visit his Flickr Photostream.

  David's Observation Notes.

  Hello everyone,

  The poor weather in late November meant that I was able to get out only twice, the 23rd and 29th. The 23rd was a new moon but the forecast was very poor for the next week so I decided to try Messier 76 in hydrogen alpha - at least that way I could return to it on the next fine night and capture more narrow band data, even though it might be close to full moon. Sure enough the next fine night the 29th was close to full moon and I returned to M76 and see what oxygen III and sulphur II data I could capture.

  In the end I managed to capture two hours each of H-alpha, Oxygen III and Sulphur II. The core of M76 is relatively bright and showed up well but the outer regions are very faint and needed some teasing out in processing.

  I've tried both a Hubble palette (red, green, blue is derived from sulphur, hydrogen and oxygen, respectively) and the less frequently seen HOS palette (red, green, blue is derived from hydrogen, oxygen and sulphur, respectively). The Hubble palette gives a predominantly blue image from which it was difficult to tease out any detailed structure. The HOS palette yielded a green/yellow and red image and more of the detail could be teased out by tweaking the colour balance in Photoshop.

  So this is Messier 76 in HOS palette. Six hours of data was captured in 20 minute subs, equally split between hydrogen-alpha, oxygen III and sulphur II.

  Image details

  Image Processing

  Pixinsight and Photoshop.

  Telescope

  254 mm Newtonian with Tele Vue Paracorr at F/4.5

  Camera

  QSI 583wsg with Astrodon 3 nm narrow band filters. Off-axis guiding by SX Lodestar.

  Mount

  EQ6 controlled by EQMOD