The Soul nebula

This is now probably one of my favourite parts of the night sky — The should nebula.

I first imaged this deep sky object a year or so ago, but I had some complications with my equipment and mixed with some rather unfavourable seeing conditions, the starts ended up bloated and had halos around the stars. It was a horrible space image!

But, my knowledge and experience has grown since then, as has my equipment. Not sure the weather has gotten better though!

I took this vibrant image of a part of the soul nebula in September 2024, from my back garden on the west coast of Scotland.

The total exposure time is around 9 hours, split over 3 hours each of Hydrogen (Ha), Sulphur (SII) and Oxygen (OIII) filters. I use Altair narrowband filters. They are truly amazing!

My filters are 3nm band width which means they will let in more light and help reduce the noise that is naturally gained though taking longer exposures of deep sky objects.

Each sub frame or light frame was 5 minutes or 300 seconds in length.

I imaged it using my monochrome setup. I have a ZWO 533MMPro cooled camera, and I love that little red camera. I used to own the 533MCPro which was the same camera but the colour version. I loved that camera too.

A lot of astronomy types talk about SNR and things like Amp glow ( although technically I think it is just called glow on these SONY sensor cameras. The ASI533MM PRO features Sony's latest back-illuminated IMX533CLK-D sensor, with a square (15.97mm diagonal) 9.07MP format. Some poe hate the square format sensor but I love it.

I used some specialist software to process the image called Pixinsight and finished the image off in Adobe Photoshop.

I still love processing these objects and will never tire of processing this one for sure.