Cocoon Nebula/IC5146: This is an emission (red), reflection (blue) and absorption nebula in Cygnus. It is a stellar nursery, with the bright star at the center estimated to be only about 100,000 years old. It also is visually integrated with a small open star cluster, containing about 20 stars. The Cocoon Nebula is about 4000 light years away.

Technical Information:

LRGB: 120:30:30:30 (L unbinned-comprised of twelve 10 minute images; RGB binned 2x2, comprised of three 10 minute images each).

Equipment: Meade 12" RCX400 at f/8.5, an SBIG ST-8XE camera/CFW8 color filter wheel with Astrodon filter set, guided by an SBIG AO-7 adaptive optics device, guiding at about 7 Hz.

Image Acquisition/Camera Control: CCDSoft V5.

Processing: All images calibrated (darks, dawn flats and flat-darks) and registered in CCDSoft. Blooms removed using Ron Wodaski's deblooming plug-in for CCDSoft. Luminance layer average combined in Ray Gralak's sigma reject program; R,G and B average combined in CCDSoft. One iteration of Fast Richardson-Lucy deconvolution, and 15 iterations of slow Richardson-Lucy (high frequency components only) in AIP4WIN. Color combine, very gentle unsharp mask on the luminance layer, gaussian blurs, and adjustment of curves and levels, performed in Photoshop 6.0.

Location: All images taken from my yard in Redmond, Washington, USA, elevation 500'.

Date: All images taken on the night of July 3, 2005.

CCD Temperature: -25C

Moon Phase: No moon

Seeing: Good, with 2.8 Arcsecond average FWHM in single calibrated image, deconvolved to 2.0.

Transparency: Below average

Image Scale: .793 arcseconds per pixel

Copyright 2005 Mark de Regt

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