Distance: 1,600 ly

Telescope configuration: Celestron EdgeHD 1100 with the Celestron 0.7x focal reducer (fl=1960mm, f/7.0). Camera: SBIG STF8300M. Best 7 of 9 - 5 minute exposures. CCD temp -10c.
Image capture scale: 0.56 arc-sec/pixel (un-binned). Field of view (horizontal) = 9.5 arc-min. Image capture using Software Bisque TSX Pro Camera Add On.
Mount: Orion HDX110 German equatorial mount. Autoguided with an SBIG Sti autoguider, a Celestron OAG (off-axis guider) and a Starlight Xpress SXV-AOLF (Adaptive Optics Large Format) device using PHD2 autoguiding software, not dithered.
Post processing: ImagesPlus 6.5: FITS conversion, alignment, stacking/combining using 0 dark frames, 0 bias frames and 0 flat frames, Sigma Clipped Median Combined factor 2.55, Auto-stretched, no color adjustments. Micro Curves, Noise reduction MultiResolution Sharpening in ImagesPlus 6.5. Resized to 50pct (resampled to 1.11 arc-sec/pixel), one pass unsharp mask and cropped to final dimensions in ThumbsPlus10.

20160227_M78_CombSigMed-IPddpad-TPadj.jpg