Sh2-292
Sh2-292 - Click here for full resolution
Sh2-292 is a prominent emission nebula located in the constellation Canis Major, approximately 3,000 light-years from Earth. It is part of the larger Canis Major OB1 association, a region rich in massive, young stars that illuminate and shape the surrounding interstellar medium. Sh2-292 is actually a H II region, meaning it is a cloud of ionized hydrogen gas energized by the intense ultraviolet radiation from nearby hot, young stars. This radiation excites the hydrogen atoms, causing the nebula to emit a characteristic red glow, typical of emission nebulae. The most significant star contributing to its illumination is HD 53367, a massive B-type star. The nebula is often associated with NGC 2327, a smaller reflection nebula embedded within Sh2-292, giving the overall region a mix of emission and reflection characteristics. Sh2-292 is also a site of active star formation, with several embedded protostars and young stellar objects (YSOs) identified within its boundaries. Sh2-292 is the head of the Seagull Nebula (IC2177 or LBN1027), a much larger region of nebulosity of various natures.
source: Wikipedia
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IC2177
Seagull Nebula
Emission Nebula
Canis Major
07h 04m 25s
-10° 27.3′
3.7 kly
-
24 January
42º S
Conditions
Sh2-292 is a typical winter target, but never rises far above the horizon. A maximum altitude of 42° is reached in late January. Sh2-292 was photographed over 7 nights during December 2024 and the first half of January 2025, from the remote observatory at IC Astronomy in Oria, Spain.
Equipment
The default rig at the observatory was used. The core of this rig is a Planewave CDK-14 telescope on a 10Micron GM2000 mount, coupled to a Moravian C3-61000 Pro full-frame camera. The RoboTarget module in Voyager Advanced automated the process to find optimal time-slots during astronomical night.
Telescope
Mount
Camera
Filters
Guiding
Accessoires
Software
Planewave CDK14, Optec Gemini Rotating focuser
10Micron GM2000HPS, custom pier
Moravian C3-61000 Pro, cooled to -10 ºC
Chroma 2” H-alpha, OIII and SII (all 3nm) and Red, Green and Blue unmounted, Moravian filterwheel L, 7-position
Unguided
Compulab Tensor I-22, Windows 11, Dragonfly, Pegasus Ultimate Powerbox v2
Voyager Advanced, Viking, Mountwizzard4, Astroplanner, PixInsight 1.9.2
Imaging
Sh2-292 is the head of the Seagull nebula and not often photographed on its own. The impressive structure of the whole Seagull nebula is often captured using a more wide-field setup. But Sh2-292 as an object by itself fits perfectly in the field of view of the long focal length setup used for this image. The intend was to make this an SHO image, and as such the data was collected. However, signal in OIII in this area was very dim, so the final result is more kind of an SO image. The image was shot as a typical narrowband image, using 10 min. exposures for each of the narrowband filters. For star colours, RGB images were collected as 10x3 minute subs. The total exposure was just over 19h.
Resolution (original)
Focal length
Pixel size
Resolution
Field of View (original)
Rotation
Image center
9368 × 6204 px (58.1 MP)
2585 mm @ f/7.3
3.8 µm
0.30 arcsec/px
47' x 31'
-180°
RA: 07h 04m 57.301s
Dec: -10° 27’ 32.56”
Processing
All images were calibrated using Darks (50), Flats (50) and Flat-Darks (50), registered and integrated using the WeightedBatchPreProcessing (WBPP) in PixInsight. All further processing was done in PixInsight, including the use of scripts and tools developed by RC-Astro, SetiAstro, GraXpert, and others. For a step-by-step description of the processing techniques applied, see process flow below.
During the WBPP process, quite a few of the Ha and SII images did not register very well, due to some bad image quality as some of these frames were recorded at pretty low altitude. The signal in these channels was so strong that with the resulting 5h or so of exposure, they came out quite nicely.
Both the SII and Ha channel had a lot of signal in them. But the OIII signal was very faint. When regular SHO mapping was performed followed by NarrowbandNormalization, the resulting image did not appeal very much. Therefore alternatively, NBColourMapper was used to put the three narrowband channels together. For Ha, I ended up using a bit of a lime-colour (hue: 73). SII was mapped to an intens red (hue: 353) and OIII was mapped to intense blue (hue: 230). But as mentioned above, and can be seen in the individual colour channel images below, the OIII did not contribute much to the final image.
Besides the expected strong signal in the Ha channel, the signal in the SII channel was also abundantly present. In contrast, the OIII channel did hardly show any information in this part of the nebula. While the image is mapped as an SHO image, effectively it is more like an SO image.
After mapping the colours, some additional warming up of the red-tones was performed with help of a red mask. The resulting image is very much a yellow/gold/reddish image, in which hardly any blue of the OIII can be seen. So it may be hard to call this an SHO image, even though a lot of OIII exposure is used.
The rest of the processing followed a very standard processing workflow. The final image was rotated 180° for aesthetic reasons, so one could argue that the image is currently ‘on its head’.
Processing workflow (click to enlarge)
This image has been published on Astrobin
