Last Saturday I went up to Coe to end up the RGBs of an image I've been trying to capture for weeks. Since I only needed a couple of hours for that, and I still had plenty of time to do something else (I started around 11pm and at 1am I was already finished), I decided to do a quick capture of the Virgo Galaxy Cluster, as it was already well positioned in the sky. I had the FSQ with the focal reducer, and although it's not usual to take this area with such a big field, I decided to leave the reducer in the scope. Kepe in mind however that at almost 5 arcsecs per pixel, the resolution and details cannot be too impressive. The RGBs aren't perfectly aligned, something I need to look into.

This image comes from the same data as the previous image except that this one includes over three hours of Ha data.

After being done with the previous image - where I could barely use any Ha -I told Ray I would like to capture one night worth of Ha only. This time, Ray capture the Ha data himself and when he was done he sent me the calibrated image. I added the Ha to the LRGB I already had and reprocessed the image. Later Ray sent me the image as he processed it. I took that image, extracted the luminance, blended it with my previously processed HaLRGB image, did some additional processing, and the result is what you see.The highlight of the image is the interesting planetary nebula at the bottom-left of the image. It was identified as PN G227.1+00.5.

But a deeper exposure and a much more careful processing will reveal that these galaxies, far from being visualized against a nearly dark, empty background, they are surrounded by huge clouds of dust.

The truth is that the galaxies are not surrounded by this dust - the dust is much closer to us than the galaxies - it just happens to look that way. Kind of like looking at the moon on a partially cloudy night.

This dust, unlike classic reflection nebulas - that are usually illuminated by neighboring stars - is actually illuminated by the glow of our own Milky Way galaxy. And yes, it is very very faint. Steve Mandel named this nebulosity Integrated Flux Nebula, or IFN.

One of the first things I wanted to do once I've got my CCD was to try this field and see if I was able to pull out all that IFN. So I spent three nights capturing data, at three different sites and under three different - but similar - skies. BTW, using several sites is not a requirement to capture IFN, it just so happened that on each of these nights I went to different dark sites.

I ended up only collecting the luminance acquired in one night at Henry Coe (I had to throw away the previous luminance collected at Dino Point), then the RGB at Coyote Lake. The sky conditions at Henry Coe started a bit below average, but around 1:30am the fog rolled in the valley, completely covering the lights of San Jose and Morgan Hill, leaving the site in spooky darkness. Still, I believe this is probably so far the only clear capture of IFN through an image of only 2 hours of luminance, and all under skies not far from city lights (Morgan Hill is only about 6 miles west of the location at Henry Coe State Park where I captured the luminance)

It is my second "serious" image with the FSQ and the STL11k, proving so far that they are a team. Processing this image was extremely challenging but despite I'm not completely satisfied the way the stars ended up, I'm very pleased with the image and in particular the amount of IFN that I was able to pull out.