IC410 - The "Tadpoles"

Object Description (Adapted from APOD):
A faint, dusty rose of the northern sky, emission nebula IC 410 lies about 12,000 light-years away in the constellation Auriga. The cloud of glowing hydrogen gas is over 100 light-years across, sculpted by stellar winds and radiation from embedded open star cluster NGC 1893. Formed in the interstellar cloud a mere 4 million years ago, bright cluster stars are seen just below the prominent dark dust cloud near picture center. Notable near the center position in this wide, detailed view are two relatively dense streamers of material trailing away from the nebula's central regions. These "tadpoles" (seen just below center) are regions of denser, cooler gas, and more slowly resist the erosive radiation from the hot stars. High radiation slowly eats away at these gaseous pockets and the matter streams away from the stars, creating the tails seen in the image. Potentially sites of ongoing star formation, these cosmic tadpole shapes are about 10 light-years long.

Dates Taken:
- 11/16/2007 through 11/30/2007

Equipment Used:
- TMB 203 F/7
- SBIG STL-6303
- Paramount ME
- Optec 3" rotator
- Starlight Instrument's Digital Feather Touch Focuser, (with electronic focusing)
- Astrodon narrowband Ha filter

Exposures:
- Ha: 26x30 minutes (13 hours)

Processing:
CCDStack:
1)  Calibration with darks, flats, and bias frames
2)  Bloom rejection
3)  Impute (minor) bloomed pixels
4)  Image registration
5)  Normalization (Auto)
6)  Data rejection (Poisson sigma)
7)  Mean combine
8)  Hot/Cold Pixel rejection
9)  Impute hot/cold pixels
10) Deconvolution, Positive Constraint, 25 iterations

Photoshop CS2:
1) Noel Carboni’s Photoshop action for “local contrast enhancement”
2) Shadow-highlight to bring up the background data
3) High Pass filtering technique to bring out large and medium-scale structures
4) Noise removal (NeatImage)
5) Contrast curve adjustment layer
6) Additional deconvolution and sharpening