Soul Nebula

[drja...@aol.com]

The Soul 'Nebula' is actually a collection of nebulae and star clusters, including IC1848, three quarters across to the right of the attached image. The complex is a star forming region in the Constellation of Cassiopeia, about 7500 light years away and about 100 light years across. Many stars are only a few million years old, (compared to our Sun at 4.6bn), (all Wikipedia). These show up as the hot blue stars in the attached image.

The image below is based on data taken on 6 & 7 April 2026, using the f5 Dwarf Mini Smart one shot colour camera, 30mm aperture and 150mm focal length. The first night captured narrowband Ha data using the built in duoband filter, and the second night captured full RGB.

The narrowband data were stacked and denoised using Dwarfvision, the built in Dwarf app. Stars were then extracted from the overall narowband data image using StarNet in Pixinsight, to leave a starless image. Some further processing was carried out on the starless image to remove gradients and bring out the nebulosity.

Stars were also removed from the RGB image. The RGB stars were then combined and aligned with the processed narrowband data, using Pixinsight. The result is a combination of Ha nebulosity and RGB stars as here.

Night 1 captured 60 x 60 second narrowband filtered exposures at gain 60, and night 2 captured 30 RGB frames of 60 seconds also at gain 60.

James