gorann

Nice image Olly! It is named after its discoverers: amateur astronomers Harold Lower and his son Charles, who spotted it in 1939. I aimed at it about a year ago with NBZ filter and RASA 8. Cheers, Göran

I am following this thriller. Hopefully it is "just" to replace the Sitech box. It is a bit expensive but it would be even worse if you had a Mesu 200 Mk I like I have with the Sitech II. It costs 1100 USD in the US. Fortunately I have had no problems with mine so far.

Beautiful image. You caught some really nice detail there Steve! You may also consider aiming your RASA at it as there is quite a lot of IFN around: https://www.astrobin.com/0jy6z6/

Got my dual-RASA 8 rig up and running in the obsy. Temperature is an agreeable -10°C after having been between -22° and -29°C for a week with Pu-in sending Siberian air flowing down over Scandinavia. My fingers really felt the difference.

The 14" f/10 Meade ACF that I have illuminates a full frame sensor (24 x 36 mm), and maybe most other Meade ACFs do the same. Meade says that the reducer will just about illuminate an APS-C sensor (so 18 x 24), so essentially what it will do is to allow one to use a APS-C camera instead of a full frame to get the same FOV, which will be a less expensive camera in many cases. But for those like me with a full frame sensor the reducer will be of no use (just creating a circular image on the sensor).

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: