Stellar Shot of the Week: July 2, 2021
Sh2-132 - "The Lion Nebula (in HOO) - by Douglas Struble
Congratulations to this week's Stellar Shot selection, which goes to the always-impressive Douglas Struble! Douglas has a couple of our scopes, but this particular image was taken with the infamous SV70T and an ASI1600mm-p from @ZWOASI. As with the majority of his work this image was taken under Bortle 8 skies (in other words lots of light pollution), and despite going for a rarer target from poor-quality skies with a little telescope he was still able to produce an image good enough to be featured in the July 2021 special issue of Sky and Telescope! Douglas always manages to find targets that are a bit off the beaten path, and this is no exception but in this case he even used a processing technique that is a bit obscure too! This image of the Lion's Head uses a bi-color mixture of H-alpha and Oxygen-3 for the nebula (which is what gives it that red/white/blue tint), but it has stars that were processed in a full Hubble pallet of H-alpha, Oxygen-3, and Sulphur-2 to add a bit of narrowband feel (although they were color shifted to retain the more natural look of the nebula itself). Of course the details here are beyond fantastic as well, a fact doubly impressive considering the scope only had 70mm of aperture! Great work by Douglas, and everyone else please make sure to submit your own images to us directly by email, or by tagging them with #stellarvue and #stellarshot
Information (from Douglas): "Sharpless 2-132 is a very faint emission type nebula on the Cepheus/Lacerta border. It lies at a degree southeast of Epsilon Cep and has a size of about 40 arc minutes. It is estimated to be about 10,000 to 12,000 light years away, but this is no more than an estimate. It's a well studied region as well, with lots going on as you can see in the image. It can be glimpsed visually, but that takes a rich-field refractor and very dark skies. I originally captured and processed a Hubble Palette version about a year ago. In these cloudy winter months here in Michigan I wanted to try a more natural palette in HOO. The stars are still in SHO but color shifted to a more natural look.
Astrobin Link: https://www.astrobin.com/thh5fw/
- Integration Time: 20.9 Hours
- Bortle Dark-Sky Scale: 8.00
- Completion Date: 12-24-20
- Location: Taylor, MI (EST) USA
- Imaging Telescope: Stellarvue SV70T
- Aperture: 70mm
- Camera: ZWO ASI1600MM-Cooled
- Filters: Astrodon OIII and Astronomik Ha with SHO Stars
- Software: SGP, PHD2, PixInsight & Photoshop CC"
