gorann

Thanks Francis! Yes, I know, I should not complain. It is easier to fight the cold than the clouds.

These rather bright Ha objects from the Sharpless catalogue are rather low on my south horizon, but at their highest this time of the year so I grabbed the opportunity. They are surprisingly rarely imaged, but may sometimes be included in wide-field images of their close neighbour the Rosette Nebula. Note the Oiii emitting shock wave created by the central bright ionizing star HD 46573 in Sh2-280. Caught 8 January while nearly freezing my fingers off at -22°C with my dual-RASA8 rig with ASI2600MC and IDAS NBZ dual-band filter (Ha+Oiii), on a Mesu 200. 74 x 5 min. Processed next to my fire place in PI and PS with The XTerminator tools. Cheers, Göran

I wonder why they put such a small sensor into it, unless the optics are not made to/cannot be trusted to produce a larger decent imaging circle. This is how it compares to my RASA 8 with an ASI2600MC. Not much of a wide field scope:

Thanks a lot guys for your nice words! I use a Mesu 200 Mk I for this rig. Maybe friction mounts are less sensitive to temperature - it did not make any odd sounds, acturally Mesu 200 makes virtually no sounds at all at any time. And thanks Robin for maybe solving the KN mystery!

Thanks you so much Francis!

Thanks Dave! Yes, but rather cold weather than cloudy skies😁

Thanks a lot Clarkey! That is why @tomato and I have double rigs😅

Thanks a lot Steve! Yes, we have Siberian air coming down over Scandinavia. In northernmost Sweden they reported -43°C. I skipped one night when it was -29°C and even if it was only -22°C last night one of my laptops said "Temperature Shutdown" even if it was sitting on a car seat heater, so I could not image with the piggybacking Samyang, but got RASA data. Temperature should increase in a couple of days but so will clouds🤪

Thanks Roy, much appreciated!

Tanks, you are too kind! CS Göran

Thanks Chris! It is "just" a star but it appears to create some reflection nebulosity. I actually had another clear night until midnight tonight and it was only a merely -23°C so I went for it. Hopefully something to stack, process and post tomorrow. We have really had some extreme cold up here in Scandinavia for the last week. CS, Göran

Thanks a lot!

This is a large but very faint SNR in Auriga. It appears to be very rarely imaged, and I could only find four images of it on Astrobin. Even more rarely imaged is the small planetary nebula in the bottom middle. This image may be the first disclosing a central Oiii signal in that PN. Aladin and the HASH data base tells me it is PN KN 36. I could not immediately find out what (who) "KN" refers to, maybe someone can tell me. This is the first data I have collected in 2024, and the first for a month as both clouds and the moon has conspired against me. It was taken during a very cold (-25°C) night with 40 cm snow on the ground, which unfortunately brightens up the night even without a moon. So my SQM was 20.3, and not the 21.6 I can get on a moonless night without snow on the ground. The next night was also clear but then the temperature fell to -29°C and I decided against opening up the obsy for the well being of both me and the equipment. It was taken with my dual-RASA rig so I could collect a fair amount of data in one night. 260 x 5 min, so nearly 22 h with RASA8 with ASI2600MC and NBZ filter so Oiii and Ha. Processed in PI and PS with the XT tools of course. Here is a crop of the small PN KN 36. Something for someone to aim at with a longer focal length telescope.

I take the opportunity of posting a new version where I started off by putting Ha and Sii (50:50) to the red channel and Oiii to both the blue and green channels (first time for me using Pixel math in PI - thanks @wimvb for guiding me). Then quite a bit of tweaks to the colour curves in PS. I am still intrigued by some of the structures that emerges in this deep data in addition to the well known Crescent and Soap bubble.

PS. My only point is that pink is far from magenta but is white light with a red bias. Magenta is purple so red light mixed with blue. As @vlaiv states then there are many shades of red, blue and green, so there are many shades of pink and purple.

Yes of course I know that but red, blue and green are not solitary wavelengths

And I now mixed red with 50% white in Photoshop and got what I this is pink:

I am quoting Wikipedia again (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Magenta), The first line says "Magenta (/məˈdʒɛntə/) is a purplish-red color"🙂

Yes, I thought of suggesting holding up a Ha filter to a daylight sky.

I disagree Mandy and think you are mixing up pink with purple (=magenta). In my world pink is a pale red colour and Wiki says "Pink is the colour of a namesake flower that is a pale tint of red. It was first used as a color name in the late 17th century." Here is what "pure pink" looks like in a colour scheme:

Thanks a lot Grant and Ikarus! Excellent data as always and a lot of great renditions have been posted! Here is my first version. Started off by combining the filters as a HSO image. Run the new BlurXT2 AI4 on it. After some stretching in PS there was a lot of green areas (so apparently there is a lot of Sii in this area). Since I am no fan of green in astrophotos I stared tweaking the colours using selective color and curves in PS, all on a starless layer (StarXT). Then a bit of NXT and HiPass filtering. I am sure I did a few other things that I forgot about. There are some interesting filamentous structures, for example up in the top left corner, and some blue structures to the left of the Bubble. Makes me think SNRs. Maybe someone here knows. Cheers, Göran

Is not pink a mix of red and white light? Maybe your discharge lamp also produces some more broadband light that is mixed in with the Ha. 656 nm is near the middle of the red part of the spectrum.

Looks great Wim, especially for 4+ hours under our current conditions, although the PI work flow says nothing to a PS man like me, but I am sure a PS filter can do the same. Myself, I sometimes like to give Ha images a touch of red to indicate their true colour.

That is a great journey Gaz! The current one is excellent. I feel I have done a similar journey since I started back in 2015. This steady progress is of course a major factor in what makes this hobby so rewarding. Still, even if I think that my first images now look quite pathetic, I seem to remember that I was quite pleased with them at the time, actually quite excited, which is probably what kept me going.

Certainly eye-candy for me Olly!