Butterfly Nebula - IC 1318 Prime Focus Pictures
 Images Copyright © 2013 by Dick Locke.  All Rights Reserved.  Contact and Image Use Information

This page features prime focus telescope images of the Butterfly Nebula in the Gamma Cygni (Sadr) area, also known as IC1318.  Click the icon below for wide-field shots of this densely populated area of the sky.  (Its easier to see the "butterfly" in the wide shots.)

 
Butterfly Nebula - Gamma Cygni wide-field pictures here


Butterfly Nebula Area: Narrowband, Bluish Palette

 

Cygnus the Swan is high overhead early fall in the northern hemisphere.  Cygnus looks like a big cross, and Sadr is the star in the middle of the constellation.  Sadr (magnitude 2.2, "Gamma Cygni") is shown in the mid-upper part of these images.  The narrowband images here are from the Starry Nights B&B and represent 8.5 hours total exposure.  A lot of people seem to prefer the "blue" version (above) to the Hubble Palette version (below), which do you like?

 

Image Information:  The color images are constructed from multiple images over three nights: 35*5 min (175 min) H-alpha, 41*5 min (205 min) OIII, and 26*5 min (130 min) SII in the Fall of 2013.  That's a total of 510 minutes exposure or 8.5 hours.  The images were captured and processed via my typical image processing methods described here.  Equipment: SBIG ST-8300 CCD camera with the FW8-8300 filter wheel, Astrodon narrowband 36mm filters, the Takahashi FSQ-85 telescope with reducer, AP 900GTO mount.

 


Butterfly Nebula Area, Hubble Palette

 

The golden "Hubble Palette" version features the same 8.5 hours of exposure described above, but assigns colors as follows:  Red = SII, G = Ha, B = O3.  Equipment: SBIG ST-8300 CCD camera with the FW8-8300 filter wheel, Astrodon narrowband 36mm filters, the Takahashi FSQ-85 telescope with reducer,  AP 900GTO mount.  I used MaximDL to acquire and process flat and dark frames, Registar to align, Photoshop CS6 with a little HDR toning to process from there.

 


Butterfly Nebula Area: H-alpha

 

 

Gamma Cygni - older prime focus film image here

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Copyright © Dick Locke.  All Rights Reserved.
Contact and Image Use Information

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