Wednesday, February 14, 2007

The Seagull Nebula

Actually it's only half a seagull. I didn't realize how large this object was until I took my first test exposure. Even then I could barely see it, and tried to compare the stars against pictures from other websites to make sure I was in the right area. This image consists of 25 exposures at 180-seconds each. I took 30 exposures, but discarded 5 due to wind. Processing this object was very difficult as the nebula is faint, and I pushed the colors pretty hard to get anything to show up. The Seagull Nebula is located in the constellation Canis Major. The area of nebulosity is cataloged as IC 2177, while the bright "head" portion (at the left of my image) is NGC 2327.

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