Rosette Nebula (Caldwell 49)

In the freezing cold I imaged the C49 Rosette Nebula with my usual equipment:  Canon 1100D mod, 23x135sec, ISO 1600, Canon 200mm f/2.8 @ f/3.5, HEQ5, from Dângău Mare. I can say the session was a success. I used my star handling program to reduce the stars’ dominance over the nebulae.

The curious thing in the frame is the crown shaped denser star field at 6h39′, N2°3′ in the upper left corner. It lies near the open cluster NGC 2262, at 11.3^m which is just outside of this frame. I included some Google Sky and SIMBAD images for comparison, and also did an astrometry.net plate solving. With some help from a fellow amateur astronomer, known as nr74 (Németh Róbert), I identified it as Collinder 110, at 10.5^m. Noteworthy that the cluster is not listed in other obvious places. See [simbad]

In this frame, open cluster NGC2236, at 8.5^m is on old friend, known from the previous attempt to image the Rosette Nebula. It is about 9600 light years away, ie about twenty times further than the Pleiades.

raw sample

stack with curves

handling the colors

progressing

the stage where I applied my starheal

output z3 – no panda eyes, no large stars

the stars extracted

with some blur

no panda eyes

premerger 1

premerger 2

output z7 – the automatic output of my starheal – more saturated than I liked it

towards the final image: full star reduction

towards the final image: no star reduction

The Rosette Nebula (Caldwell 49) – with .69 star reduction

platesolved by astrometry.net

simbad skymap overlayed

NGC 2262 marked, the denser starfield – upper left corner on my image – circled

nothing there in simbad

nothing there in simbad

couldn’t resist a large field of view with Orion :)

The Rosette nebula as processed on 2016-10-16 from data obtained in the spring

top: No star reduction

bottom: Full star reduction