Honestly, this started out as another “filler” project. I was looking ahead to winter projects and wanted to get fairly deep looks at several targets I hadn’t shot before. A little over a month ago when I started this, those targets didn’t get high enough in the sky to start imaging until several hours after sunset. I whipped out Gary Imm’s The 750 Best Deep Sky Objects book (an absolute must have if you do astrophotography – get it!). The Crescent fit the bill for a target that was up just after sunset. It’s smaller than I usually like to shoot, but why not? I decided to throw it in the mix.

Over 7 different nights between October and November, I shot between an hour and 4 hours on the Crescent while I was waiting on other targets to rise. I grabbed 23 hours of data for this, all 10 minute sub-exposures with my STF-8300C camera through an L-eXtreme filter. For probably the first time, they were all good subs. So, all 23 hours went into the final image.

I did a quick look at the data after about 10 hours of imaging and was surprised to see so much Ha signal surrounding the Crescent Nebula. There’s also a lot of OIII signal inside the Crescent. Not bad for another “this old camera” project, I thought.

When processing the final image, I took the Ha & OIII data and assigned Ha to red, OIII to blue and did a 60 Ha/40 OIII split on green. I tried to really pull out the blue, but a few other areas on the edge of the Crescent started to get a little crunchy. I tempered that a bit and finalized on what you see here.

Here’s the full-sized image.

Here’s my Lightbucket imaging log.

My FreeDSM sky illumination data is here.

Details:

• Explore Scientific ED127 refractor
• Hotech SCA flattener
• STF-8300C camera with an L-eXtreme filter
• Losmandy G11 mount on a custom BoldMFG pier
• 138x 600sec sub-exposures (23.0 hours) from my Bortle ~5 backyard
• Captured in NINA
• Processed with Siril, GraXpert, Photoshop, NXT & Cosmic Clarity/Seti Astro’s Suite

Disclaimer: I paid for all items above with my own money. Some links above are affiliate links. As an Amazon Associate I earn from qualifying purchases.