LBN 434 is a no-show.

Last night I went after two AL BN items, IC 1287 and LBN 434. 1287, a dim reflection nebula, was an almost hopeless task thanks to the trees and the very hazy sky. I collected some light frames, but not nearly enough. The frames were so bad looking that I haven't bothered to process them.

LBN 434 is a Lynds brightness 6 nebula, and I'm beginning to think that category 6 means anything dimmer than a 5. Maybe a better classification for 434 would be a scale extension to 7 or 8. Three hours of 5-minute H alpha exposures turned up nothing at all but stars and a couple of galaxies.

The object does show up in the Digitized Sky Survey, which is more than some cat 6 objects can say. (Evidently not all cat 6s are created equal.) After some work I was able to confirm that I was imaging the correct field. Processing the image beyond all reason might show a trace of the brightest part of the nebula, but it's not nearly solid enough to submit as acquired. The object was simply too dim for me to catch under my bright hazy skies.

I may go after 1287 from a dark site, but 434 is now on my list to not revisit unless I'm desperately short of objects on the way to the required 100.

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My mosaic of LBN 270 proved to be modestly popular on AstroBin, garnering more "likes" than any other image I've made.

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My next backyard target is going to be more fun, going after M 57 to image the outer shells. This will be a multi-night task, with a lot of unbinned H alpha work at various exposure times, and then possibly the same with binned color. I'll use my C 925 without its reducer/flattener for maximum scale, and because at f/10 the ring can sit happily within the central part of the field.