NGC 1624, also known as Sh2-212 in the Sharpless catalog, is a very young open cluster. It is located in the constellation Perseus inside an emission nebula. Sh2-212 is the large Hii ball of emission nebula on the right side of my photograph. Sh2-211 is the smaller ball of gas on the left. Together they are known as the Tribbles, I assume from StarTrek lore – “Spock: “Most curious creature, Captain. Its trilling seems to have a tranquilizing effect on the human nervous system.”” – Star Trek “Trouble with Tribbles”
SH2-212 is ~20,000 light-years away. Latest estimates put it very young at only 4 million years old. SH2-211 is embedded in the same CO cloud. It is around the same distance and age. In the image, there are also beautiful dark and light dust lanes and a handful of galaxies. A couple of the galaxies are very interesting to me for their sheer distance from us.
Sh 2-212 is located high above the galactic plane in the outer galaxy. It contains the star cluster NGC 1624 and may be embedded in the same CO cloud as Sh 2-211.
The data for this photograph was acquired using Astro Photography Tool (APT 4.60) running on a NUC mounted to my OTA over the course of 4 nights in December 2024 using a Skywatcher Esprit 120ED telescope at 860mm fl, ASI2600MC camera cooled to 15f, aboard a Skywatcher Eq6r Pro mount. A touch over 10 hours of exposure.
Processed manually in Pixinsight. Steps included Image Calibration, Cosmetic Correction, Debayer, and SFS. This was followed by Star Align and SA Ref frame integration. Star Align used the reference frame. Lnorm Ref Frame integration and Local Normalization with a reference frame were also conducted. Image Integration and Drizzle Integration 1X were performed with a 0.9 drop with Lnorm data applied. The edges were cropped. Then, Image Solve and SpFC with filters were used. MsGC was applied, and Blurx Correction only was done. SPCC with background neutralization was followed by BlurX, NoiseX, and StarX. GHS was applied to the stars, and curves were adjusted for star saturation. GHS was applied to the starless image. Curves and mask iterations were used. LHE was performed. Finally, the stars were blended back into the starless image. Save as a Tiff for saving as a jpeg in PS Camera Raw.
Cheers!
