Iris and Ghost Nebula + IFN mosaic

Image Description and Details : Our fifth sky target, a wide field of 4 tiles in the constellation Cepheus with the Iris Nebula (NGC7023) and the Ghost Nebula (VDB141). To date, it remains our most ambitious and complex project in terms of acquisition and processing.
This constellation Cepheus in the Milky Way is sublime because it is dotted with bright and dark nebulae, which show superb colors and contrasts. In addition, many molecular clouds (IFN) line the constellation forming coffee-colored arabesques.
The full image corresponds to a mosaic of four tiles (with LRGB layers), which represents a total of 90 hours of exposures over approximately 35 nights, including 50 hours in Luminance (around 12 hours per tile) and 40 hours in RGB ( therefore 10 hours per tile).
Two crops were produced on L'Iris and le Fantôme.


Technical Details
250 exposures for each field, of 3 minutes in Luminance
215 exposures for each field, of 3 minutes, for the 3 RGB filters
Takahashi TOA telescope 130mm in diameter, 1000mm focal length
Moonlite Nightcrawler 35 focuser/rotator
ASI2600MM monochrome camera cooled to -10 degrees
ZWO filter wheel with 36mm Chroma LRGB filters
Autoguiding optical splitter ZWO with Camera ASI290MM
EQ8-R Mount
Software Maxpilote, The Sky X Pro, FocusMax V3
Pixinsight, Adobe Lightroom/Photoshop processing
Dates: between 28/05/2022 and 9/08/2022 (about 35 nights)

Copyright: Stephane Rolland and Pascal Gouraud (AstroDarkTeam)