Near full moon boogie

by Richard Crisp


The weather was dewy but nice in Castro Valley last night. It had been a long time since I have been able to get out, and did last night.

I have this theory that using narrowband filters for nebulae helps under moon lit skies. This should be true for both visual and for imaging. So I decided to hit some Milky Way objects with Halpha when they became observable a bit after midnight in my north-east sky.

I ended up choosing NGC7380 in Cepheus, which is a mag 7.2 emission nebula that has a lot of interesting detail: rifts, waves and so on. I had done a google search and not found too many images of it on the web, the DSS being one of the better ones. Because of the early dawn these days and the fact that it is after midnight before feasible to get this target, I was only able to get Halpha instead of some of the other lines. With a little luck, I can get the color components tonight.

At mag 7.2 I think this should make a pretty decent visual target. The FOV is about 47.2 x 31.7 arc minutes.

http://www.rdcrisp.darkhorizons.org/ngc7380_emission_nebula_page.htm

I guess if there was a new moon that the contrast would have been better, but I kind of like it as is.