NGC 281 The 'Pacman Nebula'
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NGC 281 The 'Pacman Nebula', along with IC 59 and IC 63 (a pair of reflection and emission nebulae), all of which are deep-sky objects in the Cassiopeia constellation.
I shot over 549 frames totalling over ~14.2 GB of data, and stacked the best 90% of light frames for a total of 494 30-second exposures, or 4 hours and 7 minutes.
Gear Used
- Samyang 135mm F2.0 ED UMC @ f/2
- Canon EOS Rebel T6 w/ Magic Lantern @ ISO 800, 30-second exposures
- Sky-Watcher Star Adventurer
Software Used
- Siril for stacking (Even though the data was only 14.2 GB, Siril wanted ~400 GB of free disk space while I only had ~100 GB available on my SSD so I split the data into 3 groups and stacked the best 90% of each, or a FWHM better than ~3.4 px) and photometric color calibration
- GIMP and G'MIC for background extraction (I could not for the life of me get Siril background extraction to remove the wierd artifacts since I didn't use flats, so I used a good ol' method known as "erode, blur, and subtract" where you quite literally create a flat by applying erode, blurring, and then subtracting)