Spaghetti (with Tomato Sauce)


This is a bi-color version of the Spaghetti Nebula.  I wasn’t able to put together a suitable rig for the wider angle lens, so just captured O-3 (oxygen) with the same 200mm setup.  Hydrogen is assigned to red and oxygen to blue and green.  In other photos of this nebula I found online very few bothered with the S-2 channel, as there is so little there.  Well, as I said before, even the hydrogen is very dim.  Oxygen is even dimmer:  You can see just a hint of it in blue/green near the top.

I suspect that this is pushing the limits of how much light pollution can be suppressed with narrowband filters.  Under very dark skies it might be possible to show more of the O-3.  In fact, a few of the images I found did have quite a bit more O-3.  Some also had RGB data included, although always augmented with at least H-alpha data.

The wider angle version is still in my plans, but the cloudy/rainy season is starting now.  That means that there won’t be many opportunities to capture photons at all, and going to a dark sky site is very unlikely.

 


About Greg Marshall

I am a retired electronics engineer and after a few months of enjoying my leisure I began to miss doing product development. My astronomy hobby always needed new solutions to unique problems, so I decided that whenever I came up with a good solution I would try to make it available to others.

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