Sh2-114 – Echo of the Dragon War | 146 Hours

Sh2-114 – Echo of the Dragon War | 146 Hours

Shooting organizer: Timur Fakhrislamov (4ainik)
Data processing: Timur Fakhrislamov (4ainik)
Assistant: Maxim Zakharov (svarschik911)
Processing software: PixInsight, Photoshop
Shooting period: late July – mid-September 2026

 Integration:
Ha — 70 h 20 min
OIII — 41 h 50 min
L — 17 h
R — 5 h 48 min
G — 5 h 48 min
B — 5 h 48 min
Total integration time — 146 h

 Participants' telescopes:
1. Takahashi Epsilon 180ED + ZWO 2600MM / Filters: Antlia Ha, OIII 3nm highspeed 36mm (Timur Fakhrislamov) 

 2. Askar SQA106 + ZWO2600MM / Filters: Scorpio 5nm Ha, OIII, LRGB (Alyona Kiseleva) 

 3. Celestron C11 HyperStar d=280mm, f=540mm + Player One Zeus imx455 / Filters Baader Highspeed 6.5nm Ha, OIII (Sergey Nazarov)

 4. Askar SQA85 + ZWO 2600MM / Filters Antlia Ha 7nm, LRGB (Hadi Zaheer)

 5. William Optics red cat 71/350mm + ZWO ASI2600MM air / Filters: SHO Antlia 5nm (Evgeny Morozov)

 The idea of creating this image began to come to me back in May, during a study session. The object was not chosen by chance — it fit well within the telescope's field of view and remained quite high and visible for a long time throughout the shooting session.
While preparing for the shoot and studying material on this object, I decided to gather people and create a collaborative image of this region.

 In this project, the object SH2-114 showed deep and bright structures in the Ha range, and at the same time extremely faint details in the OIII range. Although this object is popular among amateur astronomers, few have done accumulation in the classic HOO variant.

 Since this is our first collaborative accumulation, and this region of the sky has already been shot in LRGBHOO, we decided to try to achieve a similar result and confirm the faint structures in the OIII range.

 The processing was not easy at all; I processed it about 10 times over the course of a month in attempts to find the best solution and consulted with all the PixInsight experts. In addition to the brightest Ha structures and the faintest OIII structures, it was necessary to preserve the dust structures, background galaxies, and the planetary nebula Kn26 (PNG 084.6-07.9).

 The planetary nebula Kn26 (PNG 084.6−07.9) was discovered in 2006 by Austrian amateur astronomer Matthias Kronberger.

 I want to express enormous gratitude to all participants of this collaborative accumulation; without your help, we would not have come close to such a result. For me, this was a huge experience both in stacking and in processing this frame.

 I hope you appreciate our work. Enjoy!