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Photographer:

Hal Heaton

Location of Photo:

Chilescope

Date/Time of photo:

Prior to moonrise on the nights of 12/31/18, 1/29/19 and 2/28/19

Equipment:

An FLI Proline 16803 CCD camera with an anti-blooming gate was used to acquire unbinned 3-min exposures through red, green and blue filters on Chilescope’s 0.5-m Newtonian Telescope 2 (f/3.8)

Description:

IC 2631 is the brightest nebula in the far southern constellation of Chamaeleon. Located about 14.9 deg below the Galactic plane, it is powered by the Herbig AE/BE star HD 97300, a massive pre-main sequence star located at a distance of ~630 lys (GAIA DR2). The much more distant spiral galaxy NGC 3620 (~65 Mlys) can be seen at the lower left of this image, which is oriented with north to the left and east down. At the star’s distance the cropped field-of-view, which spans approximately 44.7 arcmin on a side, corresponding to 8.5 lys. This synL-RGB image was formed from mean broadband images that were integrated in CCDStack for 48-mins in the red and blue channels and 60-mins in the green. A preliminary RGB result was used to create a synthetic luminance frame, which was high-pass filtered and contrast-enhanced in Photoshop CC. After adjusting the color in LAB-mode, noise reduction was applied and its contrast was selectively enhanced using soft-light blending of a masked version of that image with itself

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