Cosmic Lotus (Supernova Remnant) — 143 hours — AstroBin IOTD

I’m glad to present my SNR G181.1+09.5 capture which got awarded Astrobin image of the day today .

I started this project in mid November 2025, and from the beginning this target was a challenge. In Stellarium, I couldn’t find anything remotely to allow me to center for my FOV. Also, lost a couple of nights early on because, with my Esprit as I wasn’t sure if I could fit the entire shell into the frame.

Surprisingly OIII, for a change, was actually easier to capture — even a single 10-minute sub looked fairly promising like the dolphin head. But Ha… that was a real pain. I ended up sacrificing some winter targets just to build enough Ha data, capturing some during moonless nights which made me even question- why am I wasting my time with this.

My original plan was to make this a HOO image like my previous ones, but during RGB capture for stars I started to feel there might be faint dust present. I captured much less luminance than I would have liked, so in Photoshop I reduced its opacity and layered multiple versions carefully to suppress noise and bring out some of that faint dusty background. A wider FOV would have been awesome with the dust but I was limited with my espirit but on a fun note- I also had to crop some data, since the dust lanes were even weaker and noisier.

Ha processing was especially difficult as I could see faint arcs but don’t want to spend more time in data collection as I had FOMO from other targets and also this was among the top 3 most collected data hours for me. So I tried working with multiple stretches — one for the shell, one for the surrounding regions, and another for the faintest arc structures — then blended them back together in layers. Even then, it was a struggle.

Overall, I’m really happy to finally see this one come together. It feels worth the 2.5 months of data, especially with a vacation, busy work and juggling life as a dad with infant duties in between. Happy to kick this out of my draft and free up my storage space and now, on to more SNRs from past summer and other pending data.

Ha ~ 68hours

OIII ~ 60hours

RGB ~ 9 hours in total

Luminance ~ 4h 45 min

Espirit 100

Zwo 2600mm pro / AM5N

https://app.astrobin.com/i/kvilmy