Witch Head Nebula

Witch Head, Take 3

 in Blog  tagged IC2118 / Witch Head Nebula

Having given up on trying to process out the mis-matches between the upper and lower panels of the Witch Head Nebula (as captured in Australia), I tried 2 different ways to capture it here in southern California.  The first of these attempts was using the William Optics Star71 telescope, which produced a reasonably good image, except that this ‘scope has a defect that causes severe aberrations when there is a bright star just outside the field of view (this is the 1st version of the Star71 – I believe they corrected this problem in the current version).  Rigel, a very […]

Witch Headache

 in Blog  tagged reflection nebula / Witch Head Nebula

The Witch Head Nebula above is a target I’ve wanted to capture for a long time now.  It is a very large, and very diffuse reflection nebula, and therefore very dim, and must be captured with broadband (RGB) filters – from a dark sky site.  In the Winter.  Back home in the Pacific Northwest I never venture out to dark sky sites in the Winter because it’s too risky.  That is, even if you don’t get caught in a storm or stuck in a snow drift, there’s a good possibility that the weather will change and the whole trip will […]