This nebula is an eerie, ghostlike figure composed by gas and dust, illuminated by the massive star Navi aka Gamma Cassiopeia.

This was not easy. I’m currently encountering a bunch of issues that I yet have to properly identify. After I completed my polar alignment and focusing I was noticing really weird star patterns on my first few images. This is one of the frustrating bits of astrophotography. Such patterns could be due poor guiding, focusing issues, backfocus, tilt, spacing etc. On bright targets it’s easy to process away but on much dimmer objects like this one it’s a real challenge. I’ll need to investigate and fix this.

Anyway. This is one of my targets for this year and I’m happy with this first set of data. I will probably revisit this later this year when the nebula is higher up the sky and I will increase integration time as I’ve only been able to get 3 hours here.

I set up late on Saturday without knowing what to expect. Clearoutside was predicting orange conditions, Ventusky was giving me mixed signals on clouds and according to my phone we would have clear conditions till 4 AM. In the end I had a lot of clouds but most of them away from my target. I decided to go for the Lagoon Nebula, one of the lowest targets I can image. My guiding was not optimal and I had some tilt issues I couldn’t resolve but I managed to get around 2 hours worth of data.

This is a really cool nebula. It’s huge (angular size is 3 times the full moon) and there’s so much complexity caused by hot young stars, stellar winds and nebulosity.

I decided to play around with the HOO normalization scripts from Bill Blanshan and this is the result I got.