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Community photo entitled Heart and Soul Nebula by Steve Schaum on 07/07/2024 at Ashokan Reservoir, Catskills, NY

Heart and Soul Nebula

On 07/07/2024 12:15 am by Steve Schaum| Ashokan Reservoir, Catskills, NY

Last night, I set out to capture my toughest image to date.
This is my first attempt at the Heart and Soul Nebula in the constellation Cassiopeia. These nebulae sit about 7500 light years away from earth.
What most people do not mention, is the bright little red nebula just above the heart, is the fish head nebula.
Up to this point, any deep space object that I have decided to set out and photograph, I can usually see very faint parts of it with a 90 or 120 exposure. I was doing three minute exposures last night and I could not see even the brightest part of this nebula in any of my photos.
It literally was a chance of, I think I am in the right spot. LOL! Luckily with the help of apps to point me in the right direction, I also had what I thought was h Persei an open cluster of stars. Per the app, I knew the heart and soul nebula were just to my left. Made a slight adjustment of the camera, and hoped and prayed.

Nikon Z7ii, Nikon 85mm lens, Star Adventurer star tracker.

23 exposures, at 3 minutes each, I used the Nikon Z7ii, Nikon 85mm lens at f/2.0, ISO 100, and a manual white balance of 3550 Kelvin. For a total of 63 minutes of data. This does not include the dark, flats, and biases frames.
I opened all of the frames in LR, exported the ones that I wanted out to folders, and opened Siril and let that do the stack. After stacking was done, I removed the stars, edited the nebula, added half the stars back, and I finished the edit in Photoshop