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Writer's pictureTony Brown

The Unicorn Deserves a Rosette

I managed to get out last night and capture 40 images each of 5 minutes through my Optolong-l Extreme filter of the Rosette Nebula, this is one of the favourite subjects in the Northern Hemisphere for astrophotographers. Here I processed my one shot colour cameras data by splitting the Red channel from the Green and Blues such that I had simulated narrowband Hydrogen and Oxygen images. This provides lots of options in terms of mapping to different colours, I went with a fairly typical HOO (Hydrogen = Red and Oxygen into Blue and Green) but with some subtle Hue and Saturation changes during the 'Colourisation' of each.


The Rosette Nebula, also cataloged as NGC 2237, is a vast, intricate cloud of gas and dust located in the constellation Monoceros, approximately 4,600 light-years away from Earth. Not a well known constellation Monoceros lies to the east of Orion, its name based on the latin for Unicorn. It looks very little like a Unicorn and in fact the constellation as a whole is pretty underwhelming. It does have a number of deep sky objects within it, the Rosette being the most beautiful.


Another nights worth of data would be useful as I have had to use a fair amount of trickery durng post-processing to reduce the noise, however the weather as usual is not playing fair here in the UK (when does it ever?!), so decided to put this one out there, I may revisit with more data....






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