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glowingturnip

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Everything posted by glowingturnip

  1. So this was in southern Spain, 17th July 2023, at 21:41 local time, just north of Malaga. It was a bright streak, about as bright as a fireball meteor but moving much more slowly. There was a streak of about 20 brightly lit objects all in the exact same line of travel, falling to earth, but much much slower than any meteor I've ever seen - every object was visibly moving at about satellite speed, and they must all have come from the break-up of a larger object since they were all in the same line. Altogether it must have been in the sky for at least 15 seconds - enough time for me to grab my phone, find the right app, night-time setting and take this (awful) photo. This photo was quite a bit after its maximum brightness. It didn't have the bright 'head' that fireball meteors often do, each object was about equal brightness I'm aware 17th July was the start of the Perseids, but I've never seen a meteor like this. Any ideas ? Is Elon missing a satellite ? Aliens landed in Malaga ?
  2. HOO: HSO: And then I did two with dramatic hue shifts from HSO, trying to get maximum differentiation between the three narrowband channels - quite please with the results Ha->orange/yellow, SII->green/cyan, OIII->violet: Ha->violet, SII->orange, OIII->green: 13 each of 900s Ha, Oiii and Sii, darks, flats and bias. Skywatcher 200PDS newt (200mm ap, 1000mm fl, f/5), Moravian G2-8300 mono CCD +CC, AZ-EQ6GT, QHY5L11C OAG guiding. Pixinsight. Hope you enjoy !
  3. Just a feeble two for me this year, the pandemic has still been eating into my scope time. Hoping for much better this year... heart of the Heart Nebula in SHO Lobster nebula in SHO - needs more data, but I can literally only get 4 frames per night !
  4. A multi-year project for me, and adding on to my very meagre output since the pandemic hit: I've added on 18x900s each of Oiii and Sii to a monochrome Ha image I took 3 years back. 27x600s Ha, darks flats and bias, equipment as per sig, Pixinsight. Hi res image here and original B&W image here Hope you enjoy !
  5. Covid put a serious dent in my astrophotography, wow. My equipment is in Spain so this set, taken in the summer, was the first chance I had in about 18 months. Hi-res version here 11x Ha and 8x Oiii and Sii 900s. Darks, flats and bias, equipment as per sig, Pixinsight. This was taken in southern Spain - it's definitely low for me, a bit of a tree skimmer and shooting through the light pollution dome over Malaga (one 'advantage' of Covid was that the normal Feria lights for that time of year weren't on), but I have a bit of time as it passes over the end of the valley. From being dark enough to set up, to losing it in the trees, I was able to get 4 shots per night. Needs more data really, maybe a multi-year effort. NGC 6357 is a diffuse nebula in the constellation Scorpius. It is known as the Lobster Nebula (view this upside down, maybe the two blobs look like eye-stalks ?), the Madokami Nebula (after the Japanese anime Madoka Magica due to its resemblance to the main character, there was a fan petition to rename it), and as the War and Peace Nebula (in infrared images the bright, western part resembles a dove, while the eastern part looks like a skull). The nebula contains many young stars and proto-stars shielded by dark balls of gas. This nebula includes the open cluster Pismis 24 (the small group of stars immediately below the blue in this image), which is home to several massive stars. One of the brightest stars in the cluster, Pismis 24-1, was thought possibly to be the most massive on record, approaching 300 solar masses, until it was discovered to be a multiple system of at least three stars; component stars would still remain near 100 solar masses each, making them among the more massive stars on record. It is located about 5,500 light years away from Earth. Hope you enjoy !
  6. This is SH2-86, which is a faint emission nebula in the constellation Vulpecula, close to the Dumbell Nebula. I took these subs while back, but just got round to finally processing it. I have a full set of Oiii and Sii too, but got hardly any signal from either, so in the end I decided to go moody black & white Ha 17x900s Ha, darks, flats and bias, equipment as per sig, Pixinsight processing I don't normally do starless, except for fun, but thought this one was rather striking: SH2-86 contains open star cluster NGC 6823 which is about 50 light-years across and lies about 6,000 light-years away. The center of the cluster formed about two million years ago and is dominated in brightness by a host of bright young blue stars. Outer parts of the cluster contain even younger stars. Hope you enjoy ! Stuart
  7. yay, I just got another Astrobin top pick !
  8. thanks all ! I've got over 2100 likes on Reddit for it ! Perhaps I should sell shares in it 😉
  9. Seems to have turned into a bit of a multi-year project, this one - the original Ha was taken in 2017, though not nearly enough of it, and the Oiii and Sii in 2018, then I managed, pandemic notwithstanding, to add a lot more Ha to it: Has BBCode broken by the way ? SHO: Click for hi-res and a monochrome 2x drizzled Ha detail: Click for hi-res 9x 600s plus another 13x 900s Ha, 10x each 900s OIII and SII, darks flats and bias, equipment as per sig, taken in southern Spain, PI processing. This thread was my previous attempt,but I'm a lot happier with the colours this time. Hope you enjoy !
  10. For a while I thought I wasn't going to get any at all this year, because my kit is in Spain, but I did manage two weeks in the summer.
  11. decided to give this another go - having got my new monitor, I think the previous version was definitely looking a bit too saturated, so I've tried to bring that down. Also trying to get a bit more of a natural blue shell going round it, and I managed to integrate my RGB star colours better. What do you all think - better now ? Crescent Nebula (NGC6888) by Stuart Goodwin, on Flickr
  12. oo, I got a top pick in Astrobin - is that good ?
  13. Not quite the quality I'd normally want, since my kit is all in Spain and I'm not... But here's the Jupiter-Saturn conjunction on a smart phone from tier-4 London...
  14. Here's my latest homage to this glorious object... Swan Nebula (M17) SHO by Stuart Goodwin, on Flickr. Please click through for hi-res version. I took some Sii in the summer and added it to Ha and Oiii I'd taken in the previous year. 13x 900s Sii added to 17 each x 10min Ha and OIII, darks, flats and bias, equipment as per sig, processed in Pixinsight, taken in a dark sky sight in Spain. I've previously published an HOO version: Swan Nebula (M17) in bicolour HOO by Stuart Goodwin, on Flickr and an Ha monochrome detail: Swan Nebula (M17) detail in Ha by Stuart Goodwin, on Flickr The Swan Nebula, also known as the Omega Nebula or the Horseshoe Nebula (M17) is an H II region in the constellation Sagittarius. It is located in the rich starfields of the Sagittarius area of the Milky Way. The Swan Nebula is between 5,000 and 6,000 light-years from Earth and it spans some 15 light-years in diameter. The cloud of interstellar matter of which this nebula is a part is roughly 40 light-years in diameter and has a mass of 30,000 solar masses. The total mass of the Swan Nebula is an estimated 800 solar masses. It is considered one of the brightest and most massive star-forming regions of our galaxy. Its local geometry is similar to the Orion Nebula except that it is viewed edge-on rather than face-on. The open cluster NGC 6618 lies embedded in the nebulosity and causes the gases of the nebula to shine due to radiation from these hot, young stars. It is also one of the youngest clusters known, with an age of just 1 million years. Hope you enjoy it - comments and cc welcome 🙂 Stuart
  15. thanks very much, and appreciate the cc - this one's a strange one, I like it on most of the monitors I see it, but on my main desktop pc monitor (which is admittedly past its best), I don't like it, looks too Disney. Santa's going to get me a new fancy colour-calibrated photo-editing-worthy monitor for Xmas, if he doesn't get locked down again before then. I don't think I actually saturated the nebula at all (well, maybe the blue)
  16. Yay !! My second astro image of the year - I'm on a roll now ! I added OIII data (22x 900 secs) to an earlier set of HaRGB data (22x600s Ha, 10x180s R,G and B 2x2 binned taken in 2017). Darks, flats and bias, equipment as per sig, Pixinsight. Most of the image is HOO,though I added in some RGB star colour, which I couldn't really get to sing very much (couple of red stars top-right I suppose) The Crescent Nebula (NGC 6888) is an emission nebula in the constellation Cygnus, about 5000 light-years away from Earth. It is formed by the fast stellar wind from the Wolf-Rayet star in the centre colliding with and energizing the slower moving wind ejected by the star when it became a red giant around 250,000 to 400,000 years ago. The result of the collision is a shell and two shock waves, one moving outward and one moving inward. The inward moving shock wave heats the stellar wind to X-ray-emitting temperatures. The red tendrils in this picture are hydrogen, and the outer blue shell is oxygen. This was my previous HaLRGB attempt: Crescent Nebula (NGC6888) by Stuart Goodwin, on Flickr Hope you enjoy ! Stuart
  17. Well Covid-19 put a massive dent in my imaging this year, since my kit is in Spain and it's been really hard to get out there. This is the first new work I've done this year, about 11 months after my last one. So... how is everyone anyway ? Here it is: Bubble Nebula (NGC7635) by Stuart Goodwin, on Flickr About 20 each of 900s Ha, Oiii and Sii, darks flats and bias, equipment as per sig, Pixinsight. I went for the (Ha, Sii+Oiii, Oiii) palette since I wanted something closer to natural colouring than the Hubble palette gives, especially since the different bands are quite different weights in this target. To be honest, getting a colour palette I liked was quite a struggle until I eventually had the idea of nudging it a little bit on the hue wheel - after that and some PI curvetool trickery, I'm quite pleased with the result (depending which monitor you believe, of course) As an aside, we finally managed to get functional wifi and Netflix in our remote valley in Spain, so I think I managed to send myself half doolally binge-watching re-runs of The IT Crowd while capturing this. The Bubble Nebula (NGC7635) is an emission nebula in the constellation Cassiopeia. The "bubble" is created by the stellar wind from a massive hot young central star 44 times the mass of our sun. The nebula is in a giant molecular cloud which limits the expansion of the bubble while itself being excited by the hot central star, causing it to glow. It was discovered in 1787 by William Herschel. Hope you enjoy ! Stuart
  18. It was pinched optics in the coma corrector from being screwed on too tight (not that anyone cares, it seems 😢 ) Still not sure why the flats didn't pick it up though. Anyway, did a run of OIII on the Crescent last night, not a hint of banding
  19. jetting off on Friday, hoping to get a bit more imaging - quick nudge to see if anyone has seen anything like this before ? Cheers
  20. Apologies for bumping an old thread - Covid has meant that I've been locked down away from all my kit for most of the year - I hadn't actually imaged anything since October last year until I had a go last week. I've still got this banding issue unfortunately. I shot a new target, and could see the exact same banding pattern on my OIII and SII channels this time too. So that's three targets, all different parts of the sky and different times of the year, and all showing the exact same pattern in the exact same part of the frame as it comes out of the camera. My flats don't show the pattern at all, and I redid my master darks and bias and don't see the pattern there either. The pattern is visible in the raw lights, and the flats don't remove it. I've had all the filters out prior to the last attempt - all are clean and don't have any scratches, and unless I was extremely unlucky, the filters would have gone in with a slightly different orientation, and yet the pattern orientation hasn't moved. That, plus the pattern being visible in both OIII and SII leads me to deduce that it's not the filters. Nothing is fouling inside the camera - the shutter plane can rotate freely, and the filter wheel isn't rubbing on anything. It's a Newtonian with a coma corrector - so the only optics in the way are the two mirrors and the CC. It has an OAG I'm thinking: - light-spill/internal reflection - possible, and wouldn't appear on the calibn frames, but difficult to see how, I'm very careful with any external light when I'm imaging, and given that the three attempts were different times of year and different sky positions and yet the pattern is always the same, then it's unlikely to be reflection down the open end of the tube. I always cover the mirror end of the tube with black-out cloth so it can't be from there - maybe it's some specific light spill around the OAG, but difficult to see how - pinched optics on the coma corrector - it is screwed in very tight since to get the spacing right I actually have very little thread left to screw it on with and don't want the camera falling off (I have a safety tether), but if it was that, then presumably the flats would correct it - sensor issue - obviously my worst scenario, but then again the flats should correct it - warped/pinched mirrors - again the flats should correct it, would have thought the effect would be more blurred too Can't think what else it would be, so given the above I guess I have to be looking for a light spill - any other ideas ? I should get another chance to test soon (in Spain, so looks like I'm going to have to quarantine afterwards) - guess will try: rotate camera 90 degrees, see if it moves; try without CC; try with/without a big black cloth over everything but the end; with end covered but rest uncovered. Anything else to try ? Cheers, Stuart
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