The Rosette Nebula

Taken over the course of 57 nights, this is 200 hours of exposure on the Rosette Nebula from my Bortle 8.5 sky in Nashville, Tennessee.

You can see the (relatively) bright, familiar structure of the Rosette, but also the much fainter hydrogen surrounding it, along with delicate, intricate details deep in the core.

I realize that putting this much time into such a bright target is probably overkill, but as far as I know, nobody has ever created a single-panel image of the Rosette Nebula with this much exposure time. The longest I could find was 100 hours, and I wanted to see for myself what a super-deep shot of the Rosette would look like.

I’m very pleased with the result, and I hope you enjoy this image as much as I enjoyed creating it.

- Telescope: Askar 120APO
- Camera: ZWO ASI2600MM Pro
- Mount: ZWO AM5
- Filters: Antlia 3nm Narrowband H-alpha 2", Antlia 3nm Narrowband Sulfur II 2", Chroma OIII 3nm Bandpass 2"
- Accessories: Askar 0.8x Full Frame Reducer / Flattener for 120APO Telescope, ZWO ASIAIR Plus, ZWO EAF, ZWO EFW 7 x 2″

Integrated in Pixinsight.

Channel combination, narrowband normalization, BlurX, StarX, NoiseX, Curves in Pixinsight.

Color, additional curves, additional noise reduction in Photoshop.