"Planet of the Apes" on New Year's Day

The Monkey Head Nebula looked like it ought to make a good Hα target, and with the bright Moon nearby that seemed to be a good approach. This was my first attempt on this target. I used Astrotortilla/PicGoto to find it, but had a terrible time initially. I suspect either a bad plate solve (unlikely) or that the software didn't properly recognize the "invert" checkbox in PicGoto so the gotos were in the wrong direction until I explicitly unchecked and checked the box (more likely). So it took me a while to find this target, because I didn't know how bright the nebulosity was going to be and so took some 600 s subframes while hunting for it. Now I know what sky with no Hα emission looks like through the Hα filter with long exposures (you of course just see stars). Finally I got everything sorted and found the Monkey Head easily; it's easily visible in Hα at 20 s, and if you know it's there, in only 3 s (so it's plenty bright enough). It was very cold again (-8.5 to -11.5 °C on the CCD), enough so that it makes the grease in the mount pretty viscous. I imaged up to the meridian while watching my least favorite football team lose in the playoffs (yay!), then performed a flip and easily reacquired, realigned, and imaged until the neighbors' trees got in the way. This really does look like a monkey's head in profile; "Planet of the Apes" in the sky! I could have imaged it with the AT8IN, but didn't for 2 reasons: I already had the ST80 set up and I'm lazy, and I thought the framing might be better with the ST80 because it allows some space to show around the nebula. I'll need to wait for the Moon to go away and try for some RGB to mix in.

Date: 1 Jan 2015

Subject: NGC 2174, Monkey Head Nebula

Scope: Orion ST80 + Antares 0.5x telereducer

Filter: Baader 7 nm Hα

Mount: CG-5 (Synta motors, PicGoto Simplificado)

Guiding: 9x50 Finder/Guider + DSI Ic + PHD 2.4.1 (Win 7 ASCOM)

Camera: DSI IIc no cooling (-8.5 to -11.5 °C)

Acquisition: Nebulosity 3.2.1, no dither

Exposure: 52x600 s

Stacking: Neb 3, bad pixel map, bias included, no flats, extract R, histogram match, square, trans+rot align, 1.5 SD stack.

Processing: StarTools 1.3.5.289 Crop; Develop 74.99%; HDR:Optimize; Deconvolute: 4.2 pix; Track 3.0 pix; Magic 1 pix. Photoshop CC 2014 + Carboni Astronomy Tools Hα false color black sky; Astroframe.