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Taken 10-Aug-13
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21 of 76 photos

Sh2-160

Sharpless 160 (Sh2-160, LBN551) is a faint H-alpha nebula in Cepheus. There aren't many images of this nebula and the few that do exist suggested this would be a very faint target.

In order to get a decent image, I had to sacrifice resolution for brightness by binning. This turned out to be a genius move as the mountain was unusually windy which caused my mounts tracking to be a bit rougher than usual. But because of the binning, this is not readily obvious in the image. Still, the nebula is faint, and the resulting image had to be stretched by quite a lot to bring out the nebula. This resulted in a more grainy background than I am usually comfortable with.

Technical details:
Date: August 9, 2013
Time: 10:55 pm - 3:30 am
Camera: SBIG STF-8300M
CCD Temperature: -12 C
Optics: Takahashi Sky 90 II @ 406 mm fl (f/4.5)
Filter: Astrodon 5 nm H-alpha
Light frames: 11x20 min
Dark frames: 7
Flat frames: 10
Binning: 2x2
Guiding: Orion SSAG @ Orion finder (~162 mm)
Mount: Losmandy GM-8
Dithering: Manual
Processing: Stacking in DeepSkyStacker, Curves and Levels PSCS6.

Other notes:
Lots of meteors.

Lots of people too. A car drove past my setup about every 30 minutes. One of them, noting that I had a telescope set up, pulled up next to me and took a peek at the pictures I was taking. While he did claim to be with an astronomy club, he was not able to identify the Big Dipper. I was confused by this.

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Sh2-160