Instrument

12.5" RCOS @  ~f/9 (2880 mm fl) 1.28 arcsec / pixel.  The Zoomify image scale is 1.28 to 3.07 arcsec / pixel.

Mount

Paramount ME

Camera

SBIG STL-11000 w/ internal filter wheel, AstroDon Gen II Filters

Acquisition Data

7/20/2011 to 8/21/2011 Chino Valley, AZ... with CCDAutoPilot3 & CCDSoft.  AOL guided

Exposure

SII   690 min. (23 x 30 min. bin 1x1)

Hα    540 min. (18 x 30 min. bin 1x1)

OIII  630 min. (21 x 30 min. bin 1x1)

Click here for the RGB color image.

Click here for an Ha filtered b/w image.

Software

• CCDSoft, CCDStack, Photoshop CS and Noel Carboni's actions..

• PixFix32 (pre-beta) to repair column defects.

• CCDStack to calibrate, register, normalize, data reject, combine the sub exposures.

• PhotoShop for color combine &  on-linear stretching.

• Noiseware Pro, a PhotoShop plug-in.

North is to the left.

The Tulip Nebula, or Sharpless 101 (Sh2-101) is located in the constellation Cygnus. The emission nebula is about 6,000 light-years for Earth. It was catalogued by astronomer Stewart Sharpless in 1959.

Both images were created using the Hubble color palette, with SII, Ha and OIII data mapped to red, green and blue respectively. In the top image, the color channels were adjusted so the hydrogen (green), sulfur (red) and oxygen (blue) areas are easily identified. The bottom image uses the same filter mapping with adjustments to the channel levels to create the blue and gold motif... similar to the popular Hubble images.