gorann

I now spent a few more hours on processing the Eta Carina Nebula, finding more details in the core and dust around it (using the same methods as for the LMC). I think it got better😎. Saturday night is BBQ night here on the research station 🍻🥩🍷🍷so I hope I do not trip over my tripod in case it clears up and I have a go at a new object, probably the Statue of Liberty Nebula, but right now the weather report is not very promising🙄

Clouds prevented imaging last night but there is hope for tonight. Meanwhile I have improved (I think) the processing of my first image from here, the Large Magellanic Cloud. I used Olly's @ollypenricetrick to get more Ha visible by using Selective Color in PS, chosing red, and turning cyan all the way down. I al oturned down cyan for the magentas. Both adjustments made quite a difference. Then I brought out more of the fainter parts of the galaxiy using curves, which made the Tarantula nebula more clearly attached to the cloud.

I have heard of that book. The sad story about cephalopods is that they only live for about two years, even the biggest ones. Maybe that is why they need to be so intelligent, having to learn everything very quickly before they die......

The reason you found it immediately is that we are pioneers on snail exercise. No one else have ever done it since most snail species refuse to exercise for obvious reasons, just like Council road builders. Such an unusual field of research that even the New York Times picket up on it and made that little story out of a video we filmed here a few years ago. Fortunately, we do not only do research on jumping snails, but it is a very good excuse to get to this island😎 I attach a paper describing the research in a slightly more serious way, since ocean acidification is a bit serious. Physiology 2016.pdf

Thanks a lot Wim - yes I am quite pleased with it and that my second frame with Rigel kind of lifted it all even if there is not much more than a big blue star in that one.

Thanks Olly! I am off to dinner - I am a bit out of touch with most SGLers timewise. The is a slim chance for imaging tonight but tomorrow night looks a bit more promising. I hope you liked the little bit of Ha that my OSC managed to find around the Witch - I remeber seeing your magnificent version of it. At a really dark sky like this an OSC does quite well.

At least there are no major forest fires nearby - I hope you are ok here you are. Your sky must be rather hazy now.

Thanks! Good suggestion and I had been thinking about it but it then slipped my mind. Yes, it will come up here after midnight. I have both the Running Chicken and the Carina, on both sides of the Statue of Liverty but a bit too far apart for doing a mosaic. I would at least need too frames for that and it is a mess with a mount without computer or hand control. Also need the weather to be on my side for my last week here. Right now the weather reports keep changing from day to day, or hour to hour....

Thanks! Much appreciated comming from an Aussi. I am just barely on the southern hemisphere at 14° south so there are many of the obvious southern objects that are below the horizon here. I think I have now bagged the main ones suitable for 300 mm FL but maybe you have some suggestions? Everything below the Running Chicken is really too far south. I may also do what Dave suggested and go for some wider field shots of the Crux - Carina area with my wife's consumer-class zoom lens, but I am afraid what it may do to the stars. So, I have started pointing upwards to objects I can see from Sweden but that are usually too low on the horizon for getting a good image. Here is the first one so far - it is a 2-frame mosaic (side by side with a bit of overlap) so I could fit in both the Witch and Rigel shining on her. 90 s exposures on the Witchhead and 30 s on Rigel. Totally 255 min. I could never get this deep on the Witch from back home, and I had almost no satellite trails that mess it up when shooting at it from Europe. I have tried to go as deep as I can on this faint object and I used a bit of Olly's @ollypenrice trick of bringing out that last part of deep dust from an "Equalize" layer in PS. It even brought out some Ha. One challenge was of course to tame Rigel. For the first time here I even had a gradient issue, but not from light pollution but from Rigel, so natural in a way. Gradient Exterminator in PS could not handle the blue band created by Rigel across the image so I hade to learn how to use Dynamic Background Extraction in PI. After some trial and error I think I made it do what I wanted it to do. There are two oddities in the image that I do not know what they are (hopefully not artifacts): One centrally in the image and just above Rigel. Planetary nebulas of galaxies? Anyone know?

Thanks Wim, and soon Happy New Year! Yes, I think I have soon doubled the 2019 output - weather here has been better that expected with about every second night usable for AP, and with f/4 and a pitch black sky I do not need 10 - 20 hours. Instead 3 hours of 90 s exposures get the noise down really low, so I can do two objects on a clear night.

Here is the Eta Carina Nebula from two nights ago. 115 x 1.5 min so close to three hours. No noise reduction needed. I also caught the Witchhead Nebula earlier the same night and will start processing that now. I tried to catch a second panel below the Eta Carina Nebula after the X-mas party here last night, but the computer was apparently more intoxicated than me because this morning it said "ASICAP unexepected quit" and I only had two subs. Will give it another try next clear night. Merry X-mas everyone! Göran

We got all the animals (jumping snails) we need for the experiments and much of the time they run the experiments themselves, consuming oxygen in our respirometers - so I find enough time for AP and processing😎

I also fount time to improve the processing och the Running Chicken - found more faint stuff and unfortunately it looks like a dark dust lane is about to cut off the head of the chicken😱

And I have now also processed the data of the Small Magellanic Cloud from Sunday.138 x 1.5 min, so totally 3.5 hours. Maybe not as spectacular as it larger neighbour.

Here is the image I managed to capture near Orion last night. Only 37 x 1.5 min, so barely an hour before clouds made life too difficult. They also made polar alignment a tiresome procedure since they kept obscuring the celestial south pole. I was starring at the PoleMaster screen for an hour seeing the Octans come and go. So there was a bit of star trailing in the image. I could not get platesolving in Astrometry.net to work this morning and it was not until an hour into processing that I suddenly realized what I was looking at - amazing that I by accident aimed there early on Christmas Eve🎅 Do you recognize it? The weather report is relatively promising for tonight so hopefully I can get the Eta Carina Nebula.

Thanks Dave! I have Eta Carina and Coalsack on the list. It was supposed to be cloudy tonight but I could see stars so I had a go and tried with Eta Carina but the horizon was too cloudy so right now I am shooting straight up near Orion just to get something. I have no go-to or computer control with the StarAdventurer so I have to just try to aim it and I was looking for the Witchhead (which is very low back home), but found something else instead. Will have to do a plate solve tomorrow to see what I am imaging. Great fun anyhow, but not much sleep. I just realized that my wife has brought her Canon 18 m- 200 mm zoom. Do not know if it is any good for AP but it may be worth a try . By the way, this island is made up of granite with a 350 m high mountain in the middle, so it is not one of those that will disappear :-)

Thank you all for your comments! Yes I am quite a lucky thing right now and last night was actually almost cloudless so I got both 3.5 hours on the Small Magellanic Cloud before midnight (when if fell below som shrubs) and then the Running Chicken Nebula (IC 2944) later in the night. I am still working on the SMC data but here is a preliminary version of the Running Chicken. The Canon telephoto lens is not the greatest for star shapes so it is not for pixel peepers, and I will probably have a go at fixing the stars a bit better in processing. However, it has some advatages such as a large illuminated image circle so there is no vignetting on my APS-C chip and the fist lens is so far away from the chip (>10 cm) that dust bunnies do not show - so I have no need for flats. And it is a 3" f/4 refractor that weighs just above one kg. The sky here is so dark that there is no sign of gradients whatsoever and there is absolutely no need for noise reduction.

Here is my first DSO travel report from the south Pacific: A week ago I arrived at Lizard Island (14°27 S, 145° 27´E) for research on their marine biological station until early January. It must be one of the darkest places on earth. Lizard Island is situated on the Great Barrier Reef about 20 km off the Australian coast and this far north in Queensland there are very few human inhabitants on the mainland and no light can be seen there from here. Closest town is Cairns 200 km to the south. I have been here virtually every December since 2002 but for the first time I now brought a travel kit for astrophotography. It consists of a SW StarAdventurer and a 300mm f/4 Canon telephoto lens with an ASI071 OSC camera. Having a cooled camera here is essential. I have once tried some AP here with a DSLR with extremely noisy results since the night time temperature here is rarely below 25°C. I also brought my PoleMaster camera for polar alignment. The whole kit with tripod weight 8 kg. The lens is only 1.2 kg. Focusing a telephoto lens precisely is tricky so I had to invent a microfocuser made from a folded sheet of aluminium cut out from a beer can. I shaped the sheet into a rod that presses onto the edge of the focusing ring by the force of a rubber band. Functioning a a lever it provides both a fine micro movement and fixes the ring so focus does not slip. Even if Lizard Island is close to paradise there are unfortunately also clouds, but so far I have had two relatively clear nights. First night was spent trying to find the very faint constellation of the Octans and its southern pole star. This was not easy for someone used to the northern hemisphere with the bright Polaris, and I had to print out a bunch of star charts just to get some orientation. When I finally found it clouds moved in of course. On Friday night it cleared from midnight until sunrise, and PoleStar helped me do what appears to have been a perfect polar alignment. I then aimed at the Large Magellanic Cloud and collected 145 x 90s of data, so about 3.6 hours, which is rather ok with this fast lens. The StarAdventurer behaved perfectly with no star trails in any of the unguided 90 s subs. So, here is the first result from this adventure, processed in PI and PS on a small laptop screen - I will probably have another go at it when I get back home to my 43" screen. The Tarantula Nebula (NGC2070) can be seen in the upper left corner of the galaxy. Wiki writes: The Tarantula Nebula has an apparent of 8. Considering its distance of about 160,000 ly, this is an extremely luminous non-stellar object. Its luminosity is so great that if it were as close to Earth as the Orion Nebula, the Tarantula Nebula would cast visible shadows.In fact it is the most active starburst region known in the Local Group of galaxies. It is also one of the largest H II regions in the Local Group with an estimated diameter around 200 to 570 pc and also because of its very large size, it is sometimes described as the largest although other H II regions such as NGC 604, which is in the Triangulum Galaxy could be larger.The nebula resides on the leading edge of the LMC where ram pressure stripping, and the compression of the interstellar medium likely resulting from this, is at a maximum. Hopefully I get the chance to add more images to this thread soon - the weather report for tonight looks promising.

The wide-field is the best image, in fact it is a great image Rodd, but as you say your crop shows remarkable detail for being a 5" scope. You may be quite a bit from the resolution of the Hubble but it is more fair to compare it to big earth-bound scopes. You are not far away from the Liverpool Telescope version of it, and that is a 79" scope, see: https://www.astrobin.com/286659

Nice moon! The inverted one is great - made a dead piece of rock glow.

An excellent capture Dave, of one of the spookier things out there imho. You and your Esprits have nailed it again.

Interesting thread Wim! So I assume my SQM arrived and did not get lost by Postnord🙄 Just landed in Brisbane waiting for the next plane.😎

Yes, I was about to say that.....

I have te same reducer (if it is the 0.79x 3" version from TS) and have been using it on my Esprit 150 with the ASI 071. I also worried about the filter and TS told me that I needed to use a fliterslider as David did. However, I have been trying without a IR/UV filter and I actually do not see much star bloating. My main problem has been spacing. 55mm gave very long stars in the corners, and so did 54 (marginally better). Last session I tried 53 mm and it was better but still not good. I will try 52 mm next time.

One vote for a snail then, I can see that too but maybe not a very selling name....