Lower’s Nebula (sh2-261) is an emission nebula in Orion. Other than that, I can’t tell you anything about it. Despite it being a fairly bright nebula, there isn’t any readily available reference data on it.

This was a collaboration among several members of the Northern Virginia Astronomy Club. We had seven people and 12 telescope/camera combinations produce over 578 hours of data between September 2023 and January 2024. Despite the vast amount of data, the image scales, fields of view and rotation angles were a bit of a free-for-all making combination a bit challenging. It also didn’t help that the amount of data was larger than I could even integrate on my computer. Instead, I had to do an “integration of integrations” — integrating the masters produced from each scope/camera combination. This worked but I think the final image suffered a bit from that – though I have no way to measure that.

In any event, it was a fun and challenging project. I’m pretty happy with the final result!

if you want all the technical details, see astrobin.

Here are links to the other collaborators who have published their versions: Chris https://www.astrobin.com/q7o9rk/B/?_ga=2.46150247.1716964310.1707106015-722011445.1706299702, Gowri: https://www.astrobin.com/c8fi0m/.