Ngc6543

During this time a bit of astrophotography stall, waiting to start photographing the summer nebulaes, I wanted to try out an experiment using the small planetary chamber Asi224 to capture the nucleus of the Cat's Eye nebula (NGC 6543). I basically used the same technique that is used for planetary footage, aka the lucky imaging technique, mounting a Barlow 2x lens to bring the focal point of my telescope to 2000mm.

Convinced myself to try this shot/feat with a simple Newton 200/1000 after meeting someone crazier than me (guess who? ) that taught me to dare to push my own setup to the limit. So, I got the center of NGC 6543 and started for 2 nights in a row (plus a test night) 6/7 hours of video without driving (blessed Eq6r!!! ). From these videos, then, I extracted 50% of the best frames that were aligned and summed up to get the final picture of the kernel which was subsequently mounted along with the Cat's Eye nebula long exposure photo I had taken earlier in the year. Another novelty for me in this experiment was the use of GIMP to join the two photos together

The Cat's Eye Nebula (also known as NGC 6543 or Caldwell 6) is a planetary nebula in the northern Dragon constellation, discovered by William Herschel on February 15, 1786. It was the first planetary nebula whose spectrum was studied by British amateur astronomer William Huggins, proving that planetary nebuluses were gassy in nature and not stellar. Structurally, the object was studied with high-resolution images obtained from the Hubble Space Telescope that reveal nodes, jets, bubbles and complex arcs illuminated from the core of the central heating planetary nebula (PNN).

For the outer nebula:

Konus 200/1000 @960mm, f/4.8

Qhyccd Qhy168c @-20 °C

Sky-Watcher Eq6r Pro mount

Optolong L_Ultimate filter 265x300"

N.I.N.A., APP, PixInsight, PS

To the core:

Konus 200/1000 @2000mm, f/10

ZWO Asi224mc (gain 550) with 2x Barlow lens

Svbony UV/IR-cut filter 1766x1"

Svbony UV/IR-cut filter 11460x0.75"

Svbony UV/IR-cut filter 14025x0.5"

Sharpcap 3.2, pipp, auto beautiful! 3, PixInsight, GIMP, PS

Copyright: Massimo Fusco