Object: The Horsehead Nebula (also known as Barnard 33) is a small dark nebula in the constellation Orion. The nebula is located just to the south of Alnitak, the easternmost star of Orion’s Belt, and is part of the much larger Orion Molecular Cloud Complex. It appears within the southern region of the dense dust cloud known as Lynds 1630, along the edge of the much larger, active star-forming H II region called IC 434.
The Horsehead Nebula is approximately 1375 light years from Earth. It is one of the most identifiable nebulae because of its resemblance to a horse’s head. (Courtesy of Wikipedia)
Taken: January 7-8, 2020
Telescope: Skywatcher Esprit 80 ED Triplet APO Refractor
Mount: Paramount ME II unguided
Camera: ZWO ASI1600MM-Pro (cooled to -15C; unity gain) Bin 1×1.
Focuser: Starizona Micro Touch Autofocuser
Rotator: Optec Pixys LE camera field rotator
Filters used: Hydrogen-alpha, Oxygen-III and Sulphur-II on a ZWO 8 position filter wheel
Exposures: 32×300 sec.Hydrogen-alpha, 32×300 sec. Oxygen-III and 20×300 sec. Sulphur II for a total exposure time of 7 hours; calibrated with 40 dark frames, 40 flat frames with 40 dark-flats
Palette: SHO (Hubble)
Seeing Conditions:
Processed with PixInsight and Photoshop CC 2019 (Weighted Batch Pre-processing script used for calibration, evaluation, registration and integration of subframes)