LDN 1622 and the Barnard’s Loop, IOTD by Astrobin

It’s such an honour to be selected as today’s Image of the Day (IOTD) by the judges of ASTROBIN with this image of “LDN1622 and the Barnard’s Loop”. Thanks so much for sharing this work.

 

The Lynd’s Dark Nebula 1622, also known as Boogeyman Nebula, can be found in the Orion constellation very close to other well known nebulae such as the M78 nebula or the popular Great Orion Nebula (M42). The LDN 1622 shows an intricate silhouette mostly composed of dark nebulae. Complex structures of dust that can be detected through the use of long exposures with broad band filters.

 

 

Surrounding this dark nebulae we see the prominent structure of the Barnard’s Loop Nebulae. This emission nebula is composed of huge HII regions that can be easily detected by the use of narrow band Ha filters.

To capture this +40 hours exposure image I used my dual refractor setup composed of two Takajashi FSQ telescopes (FSQ85 and FSQ106). With the small one, the FSQ85, I acquired the narrow band data (Ha) at lower resolution (2.91″/pixel). With the FSQ106 EDX4 I acquired the broadband data (Luminance and R,G,B) at a higher resolution (1.46″/pixel). Both sets of data have been processed altogether with Pixinsight (80% of the processing) as well as other processing softwares. The resulting image shows both the emission and dark/bright nebulae as well as the field of stars (RGB natural color calibrated with Pixinsight).