DescriptionImages

Object name: GN05

Designation(s): GN05, 28, 8,

Magakian 104/GN 05.28.8 is a beautiful blue reflection nebula in the larger nebula of Ced 51 that gets nowhere near the respect it deserves. It is in the head of Orion. Apparently, it is lost due to the other showpieces in that constellation. I can't find much on it at all.

My image was hurt by a haze that varied from thin to rather thick robbing me of lots of photons and creating large halos around stars as well as fuzzing detail. Blue was especially hard hit with large halos around even red stars. Removing them was nearly impossible and took far more time than the image is worth. But with my horrid 2012 conditions that is the norm it seems. I'm getting to be a broken record on the subject. It's frustrating spending several hours more to process an image simply because of what the weather did to my data.

The small dark nebula in the red emission nebula at the top of the image is LDN 1584. Out of the frame at the top is the much larger and darker Barnard 32. The entire field including Barnard 32 can be seen at http://www.astrobin.com/30585/B/ . The image is mirror flipped with east on the right instead of the left. I hope that doesn't bother you as much as it does me. It was taken under far better Arizona skies.

If you have very good eyesight you might see the asteroid (232412) 2003 EL3 near the top right of the image. It isn't very bright at Magnitude 19.4. Even fainter and harder to find is (207288) 2005 GJ14 near the top left of center at magnitude 20.5. Quite a few galaxies are in the image but not a single one is listed by either NED or SIMBAD. So I never made an annotated image.

14" LX200R@ f/10, L=4x10' RGB=2x10' through varying haze and lots of green/brown airglow, STL-11000XM, Paramount ME

Related Designation(s):

26, 28, 7, 8, GN05,