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There was a recent break in the weeks of rainy weather. I jumped on this opportunity to capture one of my most favorite nebula – IC434 also known as the Horsehead Nebula.
Since I was using a wide field lens of 200mm, I added the Flame Nebula to the composition. The Flame Nebula is an emission nebula which is unlike the Horsehead Nebula. The Horsehead is a dark nebula that does not emit much of it’s own light. Instead, this nebula is illuminated from behind where there is a type HII emission nebula. This arrangement creates a mystical looking scene with horse head appearing from the shadows.
This region of the sky is located near the infamous Orion Nebula.
Emission Gases
This region of space has significant amounts of hydrogen and S-II gases with some Oxygen 3. I captured all three of these with narrowband filters that I purchased here.
Using these filters allowed me to get strong data even in my Bortle 8 light polluted back yard.
I just love Hydrogen Alpha monochrome images. They have so much detail and show a great deal of the emission.
Color Palette
There are many color palettes to choose from when creating images from monochrome data. I get the best results when I use Hydrogen-alpha as Red. For the Blue and Green channels, it depends on what the next strongest signal I have obtained. Since this image has so much Sulfur, I used the S-II for both the Blue and the Green channels. I have found that also adding a luminance layer greatly increases the color and detail. For this image I used the H-alpha as the luminance layer. All of this data was processed using Siril, the free open source astrophotography imaging processing program.
