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Writer's pictureTony Brown

A Squid too Far!

The Bat and Squid as it is known is actually pretty faint target in the Constellation Cepheus. In September / October here in the UK it is in about the ideal position being at the Zenith (over head).

The sort of image that is possible is shown below, this is taken from wikipedia and was donated as free use by Ram Sumudrala, click the image to be taken to the original. The image below appears to have been taken from the Ontario region near the border of Canada/US.

Squid and Bat taken from Wikipedia

In the interest of balance, this is a project that I am putting into the category of difficult for my skies / equipment and as you will see I would need much more integration time or perhaps improved skills in post processing.

I see much better images than I have been able to come up, you will see my version of this below, even though I have similar integration times. It is tempting to say that the clarity of my sky is the limiting factor, I am sure that this is one of the factors, but I think also the better images taken under UK skies seem to be using a filter with a tighter bandpass that my current Optolong L-Enhance, the same company do an upgrade L-Extreme which seems to be a popular choice. I have been thinking of this as an upgrade.



My Version


Now obviously the issue here is the lack of Squid! If you squint you can see it appearing in the centre. I think with more integration time I could get this to appear, however this is my final image after 5 night sessions that after filtering gave 19h50m of exposure. In order to make a significant improvement I think I would need double this. There come a time I think that the limits of equipment and skies simply win out!


I may have another crack at this, separating out the OIII from the Ha and processing independently, although I am hesitant as the Blue and Green signal in the raw shows little evidence of the squid and what can be seen is around the same levels as the light pollution and noise, this fact points me back at perhaps a tighter filter being used.

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