LBN 569

LBN 569 (Lynds' Catalog of Bright Nebulae) is a rarely imaged molecular cloud in Cepheus. As of this writing there are only 5 other images on Astrobin all of which are better than this and taken in Bortle 4 or less skies. This is the best I can do with Bortle 5 skies directly overhead but degrading quickly below 50 degrees altitude. I am very happy I got something as the subframes were completely blown out with light pollution and I had no way of knowing if I was capturing anything. The gradients were extreme when I first saw the stacked image even after flats and background extraction. I had to crop it quite a bit just to get rid of the heaviest gradients.

I really like these molecular clouds but you really need better skies for doing them justice. I first found out about this one from Goran Nilsson who seems to be on a mission with these types of 'clouds' from his location in Sweden. Not much is written about this object, only that LBN 569 is next to MBM 163 - 165 (Magnani, Blitz & Mundy). I really like the central structure of the cloud as well as the detail in the lower right corner which I had 'uncovered' from the LP gradient. I also used the StarXterminator program though it did a great job of removing the stars plus it was much quicker than Starnet.

Based on my limited results so far with my sky conditions, for imaging molecular clouds with Hyperstar - use with the ASI1600MM rather than the ASI294MC. However, I have successfully used the EdgeHD800 without the Hyperstar and the ASI294MC.

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LBN 569
Dates: 11-13, 11-29, 12-3
Camera: ZWO ASI1600MM-Pro
Telescope: Celestron EdgeHD 800
Barlow: None
Focal Length: 2032mm (native)
F/10 (native) F/1.9 (Hyperstar)
Focal Reducer: Starizona Hyperstar
Mount: Orion Sirius
Filter Adaptor: Starizona Filter Drawer
Filter: Optolong L
Focuser: ZWO EAF
Autoguiding: ASI120 Mini attached to an Agena 50mm Helical Guidescope
Exposure: L 418 x 90s
Gain: 139
Offset 20
Temp: 0 C
Processing: Asiair app, PixInsight, Photoshop, Topaz DeNoiseAI.

https://www.instagram.com/astroquest1/
http://astroquest1.blogspot.com/
https://www.astrobin.com/users/kurtzepp/collections/
http://youtube.com/c/AstroQuest1