LBN 438 is a dim dust cloud, illuminated principally by
extended red emission. The cloud is estimated to be about 1200 light-years from Earth (although lots of other numbers are used); at that distance,
this piece of the nebula would be about eleven light-years long. Technical Information: L:R:G:B: 630:150:210:260 (a total of almost 21 hours of light-frame exposure time); luminance was a blend of thirty-eight 15-minute images and 20 3-minute images; red and green exposures were all 15-minute exposures;
blue all 20-minute exposures. Equipment: RC Optical Systems 14.5 inch Ritchey-Chretien carbon fiber truss telescope, with ion-milled optics and RCOS field flattener, at about f/9, and an SBIG STX-16803 camera with
internal filter wheel (SBIG filter set), guided by an SBIG AO-X, all riding on a Bisque Paramount ME German Equatorial Mount. Image Acquisition/Camera Control: Maxim DL, controlled with ACP Expert/Scheduler, working in concert with TheSkyX. Processing: All images calibrated (darks, bias and sky flats), aligned, combined and cropped in Pixinsight. Color combine in Pixinsight. Some finish work (background neutralization,
color calibration, some sharpening, deconvolution and noise reduction) done in Pixinsight; some cleanup finish work was done in Photoshop CC. Location: Data acquired remotely from Sierra Remote Observatories, Auberry, California, USA. Date: Images taken on many nights in October of 2022. Image posted December 16, 2022. Date: Image scale of full-resolution image: 0.56 arcseconds per pixel. Seeing: Generally good CCD Chip temperature: -25C Copyright 2022
Mark de Regt
The bright blue area in the upper right of the image is the glow from a very bright, blue star. The bright yellow area in teh lower left of the image is the glow from a very bright, yellow star.
As is generally the case in an image I take, there are many small background galaxies in the image. In particular, I was charmed to see what clearly is a spiral galaxy, almost face-on to us, above and to the right of
the center part of the image, just below a very bright star.