alan4908

On 15/04/2024 at 09:51, TiffsAndAstro said:

Weird yes, but in a good way, as i makes you look closer and then really appreciate it. In fact, striking is a better word to describe it  

Im just getting started with guiding and its going ok

Thanks and good luck with the guiding !

On 15/04/2024 at 10:08, Elp said:

Unguided is even more impressive.

Thanks 

18 hours ago, simmo39 said:

That looks so good to me!

Thanks  

18 hours ago, Sunshine said:

Great image! this is such an odd object, it seems so out of place, like something you’d see in an original series Star Trek episode.

Yes, it does look very odd and very unreal - it looks to me like a giant alien eye !

14 hours ago, Adriano said:

Very nice image!

Thanks !

14 hours ago, TiffsAndAstro said:

At first glance, i genuinely thought it was a padlock symbol/watermark indicating copyright or something related

Yes, it 's weird 

14 hours ago, Elp said:

Nice definition of the Eskimo Nebula, not an easy one to do as your guiding has to be good. I did start it a few seasons back, nothing like seeing a perfect circular ball of O3 sitting there in the middle of the star field.

Thanks - FYI this is an unguided image - I gave up guiding several years ago after frustrations of loosing the guide star due to passing clouds - I haven't regretted it.

Alan

Located in Gemini about 5000 light years distant, NGC 2392 is a planetary nebula and represents the remains of a dying star. Formed about 10000 years ago after it exhausted its core hydrogen, the star started to cool and massively expand, forming a red giant. During this process, the cooler outer layers of the star were ejected leaving behind a hot core.  The interaction between the radiation of the hot core and the ejection processes creates filament structures. Eventually, the star will become a white dwarf.  

The object has a very small apparent size, so to maximise detail, I decided to discard any sub-frames with poor seeing.  Although some detail is revealed, I was a bit disappointed with the result.   On reflection, since the core is relatively bright, I think that a lucky imaging approach with the core, combined with a traditional approach for the outer layers, would have yielded a more optimum result.

The LRGB image below was taken with my Esprit 150 and represents about 10 hours integration time.

Alan

L:16, R:14, G: 12, B:16 x 600s all at -20C.

Located 50 million light years in the Virgo cluster, M99 is relatively large and bright galaxy and was one of the first in which a spiral pattern was observed. One of the spiral arms is distorted and the other normal, giving an overall asymmetric appearance.  The distortions of the spiral arms together with a very high (3x normal) star formation rate are evidence of a past encounter, probably with another galaxy.

 I was quite pleased to capture some detail and colours of the spiral arms and the HII regions.  For the bright core, I decided to use high dynamic range compression to enhance visibility and colour.

 If you look closely at the background you can also see quite a few galaxies, I particularly like the one to the right of the bright orange star which shows some structure. 

The LRGB image represents 16 hours integration time and was taken with my Esprit 150. A Pixinsight annotated version of the image is shown below.

Alan

LIGHTS

L:39, R:17, G:20, B:20 x 600s all at -20C.

22 hours ago, Adreneline said:

That is an impressive amount of detail Alan, and 49 hours on a galaxy target is serious commitment.

I was considering using continuum subtraction on one of my own images the other day - I need to take a proper look at the process.

Thanks for sharing.

Adrian

Thanks for the comment Adrian - I think this is one of my longest integration times ! - it did take rather a long time to acquire.  Good luck with the continuum subtraction, I will certainly be using this as part of my Ha blend process from now on.

22 hours ago, mikeDnight said:

Truly awesome Alan. Thanks for sharing it, it really makes observing it visually so much more fascinating. Your image is exactly how I see it visually through my 4" refractor! With a large dose of imagination of course!! 

Thanks 

21 hours ago, carastro said:

That is very impressive, especially if you zoom in which you can if using a phone. 

Thanks - I decided to crop it since the background objects where not that interesting.

21 hours ago, pipnina said:

I think if this image were any better it might make Hubble blush!

Thanks but I don't think it is quite that good ! although I do quite the colours in my image....

Just now, old_eyes said:

A spectacular image!

+1 for the continuum subtraction process. It is the first tool that helped me add Ha in a way that felt remotely natural. 

This is the guide I used Advanced Narrowband Combination — Pixinsight Tutorial — Night Photons. I used Method 1 'Synthetic Color Flow'.

Thanks - I'm new to continuum subtraction so I'll investigate this guide. The method I used was from one of Adam Blocks Horizon's subscription videos which are available at https://www.adamblockstudios.com/

Alan

I decided to create a deeper image than my previous attempts and focus on maximising the details of the starburst HII regions, so I decided to concentrate on gathering more Ha data.

I also experimented with a processing technique described by an Adam Block studios video called continuum subtraction which more accurately blends the H alpha into the red channel.  Here, you subtract the Red from the Ha data in an attempt to eliminate the Ha emission component from stars, so you are left with only the Ha from the HII regions.  I was so impressed by the results, I also tried this on the lum channel.

The LRGB image has a Ha blend into the red and lum channels and represents 49 hours integration time. It was taken by my Esprit 150.

Alan

M82 is located in Ursa Major about 12 million light years distant. Due to a close past interaction with a neighbouring galaxy (M81), it is currently in a period of massive star forming activity called a starburst.  Here, young stars are born at a rate 10 times faster than in our own Milky Way. This consumes vast amounts of the surrounding gas and eventually becomes self limiting and is expected to cease in a few tens of millions of years.

LIGHTS: L:41,R:24;G:40,B:35 x 600s; H:51 x1800s

Located in the Virgo cluster, M90 is a bright spiral galaxy about 55 million light years distant.

Radio studies indicate that M90 has lost 90% of its neutral hydrogen making star forming impossible in the spiral arms.  The loss occurs through a process known as ram pressure stripping where the pressure resulting from the movement of the galaxy through the intracluster medium in its cluster exceeds the gravitational force binding the hydrogen to the galaxy.  As a consequence, the spiral arms appear relatively smooth and featureless. By contrast, the centre displays significant nebula and star formation activity.

Unlike many galaxies, M90 is blue shifted indicating it is heading towards us, having broken away from the rest of the galaxies in the Virgo Cluster. M90 is now 1.5million light years distant from the centre of the Virgo cluster.

The dwarf galaxy IC 3583 can also be seen towards the top, centre of the image. The galaxy is irregular, having no discernible structure, although it does have a bar of stars running through its centre. It is thought to be gravitational interacting with M90.

Throughout the image smaller galaxies can also be seen in the background.

The LRGB image represents a total integration time of 16 hours and was taken by my Esprit 150.

Alan

M90

M90 (annotated)

LIGHTS: L:41, R: 19, G:19, B:19 x 600s all at -20C.

Here's five on my favorite images from 2023 - all taken with my Esprit 150 and a SX814.

Alan

IC5156

M74

NGC660

NGC2282

NGC5364

LBN673 is the centre of the Soul Nebula (SH2-199), a star forming region located in Cassiopeia.

The image below represents 10 hours integration time and was taken with my Esprit 150.

I used a Pixinsight Script from Mike Cranfield called NBColourMapper (see https://www.cosmicphotons.com/pi-scripts/nbcolourmapper/) with the intent of creating a natural looking image from my narrow band data.  The script works by colourising grey scale images with a particular Hue and Saturation and then blends them, all with a real time preview. The technique is similar to my previous Photoshop based approach but this has the advantage of also working with linear (eg unstretched) images.

Alan

LIGHTS:  Ha:10; OIII:10 x 1800s all at -20C.

5 hours ago, tomato said:

Yes, very impressive colour and detail for less than 5 hrs integration.👍🏼

Thanks    

I'll attempt to gather some Ha at some future time to improve visibility of the star forming regions

Alan

On 15/02/2024 at 20:07, ollypenrice said:

mpressive resolution and colour differentiation, all the more so for the modest exposure time. An outstanding result, I think.

Olly

Thanks for the comment Olly 

Alan

NGC7479, aka the propeller galaxy, is a barred spiral galaxy about 105 million light years distant.

The galaxy has several unusual features, perhaps most notable is that fact that the rotation of the galaxy in the visible and near IR is opposite to that when observed in the radio spectrum.  The spiral structure is also highly asymmetric and star formation is evident in the spiral arms and central core.  It is believed that these features can be explained by a merger event with a smaller companion galaxy c300 million years ago.

The galaxy has a very small apparent size and I found the image difficult to process with my limited data set. Whilst I like the end result, I think some Ha data would help to highlight the star forming regions.

The image represents a total integration time of 4.3 hours and was taken with my Esprit 150.

Alan

LIGHTS: L:9, R:4, G:9, B:4 x 600s all at -20C

19 hours ago, Seti Astro said:

mazing detail on those faint fuzzies.  Great job!  

I second the wish on PI Annotate to only display objects above a certain magnitude.  No one wants those dead pixels annotated or the entire image filled in with every single stars designation. 

Thanks for the comment 

17 hours ago, Paul M said:

Ah, ASTAP to the rescue. You can select the whole image as a search for Simbad and filter for object type. Here are the Quasars found. You seem to have a few pixels for most of them!

Thanks I didn't know that.  I'm pleased to see that a few photons have made there way across several billion light years into my image. 

8 hours ago, wimvb said:

That's what the TypeCat script in pixinsight does.

Thanks I shall explore.....

8 hours ago, wimvb said:

The annotation script can do this, supposedly, if magnitude is supplied in the catalogue. Although, I've never got it to work reliably.

Thanks. I'll also investigate this.

Alan

On 26/01/2024 at 11:47, tomato said:

A great FOV with lots of different classes on show. I can see several tiny galaxies not picked up by the PI annotation, which is nearly always the case on deep images like this.

Thanks for the comment - I agree the field of view is good although I had to reduce the dominance of  the bright blue star near the center of the image somewhat to make it less distracting.

On 26/01/2024 at 12:09, geeklee said:

That looks great Alan - NGC 200 and NGC 198 especially stand out with their detail and colour.

Thanks - yes, very happy with those two !

13 hours ago, wimvb said:

Very nice indeed. Those galaxies that PI annotation script didn't pick up, don't show up in Simbad either.

Btw, there is a PI script called TypeCat, by Hartmut Bornemann that can download Vizier/Simbad catalogues.

https://www.skypixels.at/pixinsight_scripts.html

Thanks - I'll investigate - I already have some of Hartum Bornemann's scripts.

12 hours ago, Paul M said:

I can't, but I plate solved in ASTAP and had a poke round with the Simbad annotation tool. Not exhaustively but enough to find a few pixels of a Quasar.

Quasars trump normal galaxies, any day... 😉

I did try to see what it looked like if I annotated the image and included Pixinsight quaser locations but I thought it was a bit overwhelming (see below).

It would be good to have a PI script that allowed you to only display objects above a particular apparent magnitude, so you don't up with an annotation of dark space ! 

An LRGB image of distant galaxies centered on NGC194.  It represents an integration time about 16 hours and was taken by my Esprit 150.  Pixinsight has identified some in the annotated version below.  Perhaps you can see more ?

Alan

IMAGE DETAILS: L:37, R:19, G:20, B:17 x 600s all at -20C. 

Vdb123 is a reflection nebula about 800 light years distant in the constellation Serpens. It‘s embedded in a large molecular cloud know as the Serpens Cloud.

At the centre of the image, the bright blue star HD 170634 illuminates the surrounding dust which scatters the shorter wavelengths more than the longer wavelengths, creating the blue glow of vdb123.

To the left of the blue nebula, a orange/red cloud known as the bi-polar Serpens reflection nebula can also be seen. Its shape is thought to be determined by the magnetic fields of the central star Serpens SVS 2 which create gas flows moving in opposite directions.

The more distant background stars are reddened due to intervening dust of the molecular cloud between the Earth and the stars.

This LRGB image represents 12.5 hours integration time and was taken with my Esprit 150.

Alan

LIGHTS: L:33, R:10, G:15, B:17 x 600s all at -20C.

IC5146 (aka the Cocoon Nebula) is a reflection and emission nebula about 15 light years across and 4000 light years distant. It surrounds an open star cluster which mainly consists of young stars. The central star is believed to be only 100,000 years old and powers the nebula.

The nebula glows red due to the hydrogen gas being ionised by interior stars, while the blue regions are created by light from the nearby stars being reflected off the dust and gas.

For this second attempt, I combined a new data set with some from 2019. This larger data set together with some new Pixinsight tools allowed me to display a deeper image. My original attempt is here: https://stargazerslounge.com/gallery/image/35093-cocoon-nebula-close-up/

The LRGB below was taken by my Esprit 150 and represents a total integration time of just over 38 hours and has a Ha blend into the red channel. The annotated image shows the location of some distant background galaxies.

Alan

IC5146

IC5146 (annotated)

L:33, R:23, G:23, B:24 x 600s; H:42 x 1800s.

Located in Cygnus, about 3000 light years distant, NGC7027 is a very young (600 years old) planetary nebula in an early stage of its development. It is very small, c0.1 light years in diameter, with an apparent diameter of c10 arc seconds. The first component to be formed after the Big Bang, helonium, was first detected here in 2019. It is also known as the Jewel Bug nebula.

The expanding halo surrounding NGC 7027 consists of concentric blue shells and is estimated to be about 3 times the mass of the Sun and 100 times more massive than the central region.  The core region  consists of ionised gases powered by a white dwarf star. The inner region has an irregular ellipsoidal shape with an equatorial band and high speed gas jets which give a spiky appearance.

NGC 7027 is more of an observation rather than an imaging target on SGL, I couldn’t find any other images, probably due to a combination of its small apparent size and high dynamic brightness range.

On the acquisition front, since the bright core of NGC 7027 causes my camera to operate in its non-linear region when using my standard 600s sub exposure time, I decided to also acquire a set of subs at 60s.

To render the core area I used a color corrected high dynamic range processing script from Russ Croman (https://pixinsight.com/forum/index.php?threads/color-corrected-hdrmt.15769/).

The LRGB image below was taken by my Esprit 150 and represents a total integration time of about 18 hours.

Alan

LIGHTS: L:40, R:20, G:17, B:22 x 600s; L:20,R:20,G:20, B:20 x 60s all at -20C.

On 02/08/2023 at 12:57, mr_belowski said:

that's sensational

Thanks for the comment 

On 31/07/2023 at 09:47, maw lod qan said:

Seeing an image like that of such splendor and beauty makes my head spin!

I can only image what it would be like being much closer so you looked up into the heavens and saw that with your eyes!

Yes, it does make you wonder....

On 31/07/2023 at 10:04, Mr Spock said:

Wonderful image 👍

On 31/07/2023 at 10:17, daz said:

That's a cracking image! So much going on!

I love images like this, where you can zoom in and see even more in the background!
Fantastic!

Thanks - I don't normally post hi res images but in this instance I thought it needed it !

Alan

On 27/07/2023 at 13:55, ollypenrice said:

Love the interactions, tails and wisps.

Olly

Thanks 

Alan

On 25/07/2023 at 22:25, peter shah said:

so much going on it that...lovely image Alan

Thanks for the comment Peter.

Alan

23 hours ago, windjammer said:

tremendous!

Thanks !

23 hours ago, Paul M said:

That's magnificent. Excellent result!

21 hours ago, WolfieGlos said:

Wow, great image!

Glad you liked it.

19 hours ago, Rodd said:

Nice!!  My benchmark is ngc 6050, which I think is an amazing horse shoe of interacting galaxies. I processed the Hubble data and can’t wait to go for it.  It’s amazing that it can be seen.  You nailed it!

Thanks Rodd. It turned out a little better than I thought it would !

19 hours ago, Sunshine said:

An amazing image!

Thanks 

8 hours ago, DrMike said:

Truly amazing. Can I use the image in my lectures please?

Thanks ....and yes you can.

8 hours ago, The60mmKid said:

I think you should change your username to James Webb. This is awe-inspiring.

Well, I don't know what that but thanks for the comment....

Alan

The Hercules Cluster (Abell 2151) consists of about 200 galaxies, most have spiral designs although some elliptical structures are also present. Interestingly, many of the galaxies appear to be interacting. The blue tints indicate star formation and are mainly associated with spiral galaxies, whilst the reddish/yellow glows are associated with older stellar populations.

This LRGB image represents about 9 hours integration time and was taken with my Esprit 150.

Alan

Abell 2151

Abell 2151 (annotated)

LIGHTS: L:17, R:12, G:10, B:14 x 600s all at -20C.

17 hours ago, MarsG76 said:

Awesome details... love it.

Thanks for the comment ! 

16 hours ago, glafnazur said:

That's a super image 👍

Glad you liked it.

16 hours ago, ONIKKINEN said:

Nice details on galaxies so small. You often go for these smaller ones and seem to pull of a great deal of detail, do you know what sort of fwhm seeing you typically experience when imaging these?

Thanks. 

On the FWHM,  if I take my stacked Lum image and measure the FWHM on a few stars that are on the linear portion of my camera I get around 3.5 pixels FWHM, so given that my imaging resolution is at 0.71 arc seconds per pixel, it suggests an average FWHM of 2.5 arc seconds.  The AI trained deconvolution app BlurXterminator is also very impressive at improving detail. 

Alan