Search the Community

Hello, here is my latest image from my remote observatory in Finland. You can see larger version in my blog: https://www.evenfall.space/post/stellar-nursery Taken with SkyWatcher Esprit 100mm f/5.5, ZWO ASI1600MM-C, EQ6 guided with ASI224MC as finder-guider, TS Optics LRGB filters. L: 128x120s, R: 50x120s, G: 45x120s, B: 45x120s. Total integration time is approx. 9 hours. C&C welcome as always.

Hello all, I managed to bag another object, this time the reflection Nebula M78 in the constellation Orion. I was planning to capture natural color subs than add some HAlpha and OIII narrowband data to emphesize the image details and reveal deeper matter, but after processing the OSC/RGB subs, I decided that adding the narrowband data is not necessary. This image was taken across two nights (juggling clouds), 6th and 11th February, and I managed to capture 3 hours and 18 minutes worth of useful subs (21x60 sec, 19x120 sec, 18x180 and 17 x 300 second subs). The telescope used was a 80mm refractor, at 500mm FL using my full spectrum modded and cooled 40D DSLR. Clear Skies, MG

After a day of mixed weather skies looked very clear Thursday 11/3 so headed out around 9pm to take advantage of a moonless night. Walking in straight from bright lights seeing & transparency were looking good - double cluster & beehive were naked eye visible with direct vision and some Messier dustiness in Auriga with an averted view. I had a vague plan to have a proper go at the Leo Triplet & had spent a bit of time on stellarium to plan how to star-hop in via Chertan & L73. First though I North aligned SynScan on Sirius and Mars (the top 2 suggestions thrown up by the app) & slewed to the the Pleiades to check alignment, which was good. Couldn't resist having a look at the double cluster from there which was so crisp and deep, then via M34 also looking good, to M42 (of course). The Orion nebula was the best I've seen it yet, looking directly at the Trapezium I could see 5 stars & real cloudy swirls above and below, panning upward there was a hint of dust in the running man area, couldn't discern the running man shape, but haven't seen this much before. Moving on up, Sigma Orionis was such a perfect little system & I toyed with the idea of binning galaxy hunting altogether and going after some close Doubles - Sirius even looked quite steady. I resisted as dark adaption was by now starting to work, before leaving the area though I had a quick go at finding M79, a low-down globular in Lepus most of which constellation was just about visible merging into the LP above the centre of town to the South. I keyed it into the GoTo & was surprised by a short slew to the E. Looking in the eyepiece I saw...something, very faint, grey glow around two dim fuzzy stars with a hint of dark lane between, not the expected Globular - checking again it turned out that I had entered M78 by mistake but there it was, a bonus nebula - not visually spectacular but nice to find & fascinating to look-up later. I made a quick sketch to confirm and tried for M79, but no, far too low by now. I figured night vision was by now good enough to have a crack at the Leo Triplet and took a GoTo to Regulus & centred. I had manually added Chertan and 73 Leonis to the app and duly centred them to get the best possible local alignment. Putting L73 in the top L of the field I should be able to pick up M66 bottom right. I couldn't be sure so moved in a pattern around & picked up a fuzz patch. Small adjustments gave me a field with two luminous patches to L & R with a star at the top, I couldn't work this out and they were faint enough to be on the borders of imagination. Everything passed behind a bank of thin cloud for a few moments and I used the time to sketch (incredibly roughly) what I had seen so far. As the cloud cleared away it weirdly helped confirm that the two luminous patches were absolutely real & I gave them a bit more concentrated attention with averted vision. As I did so a third area top R of field made itself vaguely apparent. My expectation management on galaxies is now starting to get a bit more realistic so I let this one sit for a while and added its general position to my sketch. Still baffled by the field related to what I was sure was L73 I made as good a sketch as I could of both the EP & finder fields for later confirmation ( struggling with glasses on/off, red headtorch & not wanting to fire up the bright phone app as magnitude was so marginal). I took a last long look and resolved to figure it out with the atlas & app back home. I later realised that what I had done is, after panning around, manage to confuse the star L73 with a fainter close by star (HD98388-apparently) and had absolutely been looking at all three galaxies in the Leo Triplet - the sketch, although crude, gave me no doubt that I had landed in the right spot this time, just the satisfaction was deferred until I was back inside - something I am fast learning goes with the territory of galaxy hunting with a small scope! 36 Million light years though, a new personal space-travel record I moved on to other Leo Messier galaxies & took a quick look at M95 & M96 which I found relatively easily, a dim pair of headlights but no detail, then wandered across to Makarian's chain and marvelled at the sheer number of little fuzzy signatures that wouldn't resolve to points. Concentration was waning a bit by this stage so I decided to save trying to identify precisely what I was seeing to another night when I could be out later and see them higher out of the murk. I finished with the Mak back on M81 & 2 which looked bright by comparison and gave hints of some spiral & shading detail on this night of exceptional transparency - amazing crisp view with them both in the widest field the Mak can deliver (just over 1 degree with a 24mm Baader Hyperion fixed, 63x). As I packed up the scope the naked eye panorama was just fab and seemed after so much dim fuzzy concentration, incredibly bright. I finished with a 15 minute tour of open clusters with a pair of 10x50s that was really stunning. So many stars in the double cluster, the Alpha Perseii , Pleiades, Hyades & Orion's belt just gorgeous whilst the Beehive lived up to its name like a swarm of fireflies. Starting to enjoy galaxy hunting for its own sake but for sheer beauty the binoculars had it tonight. A great couple of hours that left my mind in time & space for a long while after I got back. M78: Leo Triplet:

Here is a modest attempt on M78 two days ago. Info: 30 x 240s Light, 36 x 240s Dark, 256 x 0.01s Flat/FlatDark - all frames taken at -20C TS photoline 80mm F/6, Hutech IDAS LPS P2, ASI178MCC, TS Reducer/flattener x0.79 HEQ5, SW ST102 / QHY5IILc - guiding (mounted side by side setup), Lacerta led flatfield box Resolution: original 1.27"/pixel, binned to 40% Software: ImageJ for calibration / debayer, DSS for registration, ImageJ for stacking (kappa-sigma clip), StarTools for processing. Conditions: very cold, NELM ~4.0-4.5, heavy LP (red zone) - a lot of haze both from fog and from local chimneys. I initially aimed for 4h of exposure, and hoped for a good evening, but weather and conditions did not play along. I lost first two hours due to rapid drop in temperature - forecast was stable -4C but it turned out that temperature dropped to -7C so due to that and probably not fully cooled scope (taken from unheated basement out and cooled for 1h / 1.5h prior to focusing) - first two hours prior to meridian flip were really out of focus. Unfortunately, I did not spot that since I ran inside to warm up when I finished setup and started looping exposures. Further due to high air pressure and wind settling down - night turned out to be quite foggy - I was able to play star wars light sabre with my hand torch when I went out to do meridian flip. At the end of the session - everything was covered in frost - even laptop screen, also there were some fogging on objective lenses and even some ice crystals forming (Is this bad for the coatings?). Processing was also really difficult - low signal aside, DSS does not play nice with large (6mp) files and large number of frames. So I used the following workflow: I did my own calibration in ImageJ, everything done in 32bit precision, then ran my own debayer plugin for ImageJ (rewrite of debayer plugin that works in 16bit) - to produce R,G,B channels. Then I used DSS to do registration and alignment - I used option to save registrated frames. Then I loaded registrated frames in ImageJ and did kappa sigma clip stacking (also my own plugin). After that I used StarTools on r,g and b stacks to compose image from channels - basic develop, bin, wipe (color cast), some basic color correction and HDR, develop again - no noise reduction. Happy new year, and thanks for looking.

Another M78 I'm afraid - bit of a glut of these lately. This one from data taken in Nov/Dec, but only really finally got round to processing. Had to be very careful on combination and processing to reduce noise as much as possible to try to allow me access to the faint stuff. Taken with ST2000XM, WO FLT110 (with 0.8x FR) on a Losmandy Titan. L: 21x15m+9x10m R: 18x10m 2x2bin G: 15x10m 2x2bin B: 14x10m 2x2bin Reduced/Processed in PI, with a few tweaks afterwards in PS. Thanks for looking Blog post with details about the region/image: https://www.chromosphere.co.uk/2017/02/02/m78-reflection-dust-star-birth-orion/

Seems an easy target but it isn't. Need time to improve S/N ratio. There is a huge Ha area on the left, I was fooled and tried to remove the "gradient" Hope you like it! Thanks! The nebula Messier 78 (also known as M 78 or NGC 2068) is a reflection nebula in the constellation Orion. It was discovered by Pierre M\xc3\xa9chai n in 1780 and included by Charles Messier in his catalog of comet-like objects that same year. M78 is the brightest diffuse reflection nebula of a group of nebulae that include NGC 2064, NGC 2067 and NGC 2071. This group belongs to the Orion Molecular Cloud Complex and is about 1,600 light years distant\xc2\xa0from Earth. M78 is easily found in small telescopes as a hazy patch and invol ves two stars of 10th magnitude. These two stars, HD 38563A and HD 38563B, are responsible for making the cloud of dust in M78 visible by reflectin g their light. Telescope: FSQ ED85 Camera: Atik 460 Filters: Baader LRGB Total exposure: 7h Mount: EQ6 Location: Mt. Parnon, Greece More: http://www.celestialpixels.com/Nebulae/i-hrnGScG/A

Date: 17th March 2018 Location: Ballycroy international dark sky site in Co. Mayo, Ireland Telescope: Takahashi FS-128 with 0.75 reducer flattener Camera: Nikon D750 Mount: Vixen AXD2 Just 20 x 120s subs for 40 mins integration (far too little!). Same circumstances as the previous images I've posted lately - severely underexposed flats ruined images. Helped by this forum to realise problem. New flats with slightly different setup miraculously fixed problem. Comments and criticisms welcome, and thanks for looking. Barry Okay, I promise I'll stop spamming images now!

The last of my images from France. Taken with an SW 150mm Esprit, QSI683 on a 10 micron GM2000HPS. There were some unexplained issues with this image and I didn't get as much colour data as I would have liked as it was my last image on the last night.

I've been processing this image for quite a long now. I started acquiring data the last season when I only managed to shoot 3 panels with the Canon 6D through the Esprit 80 for a total of ~7h. This season I restarted and I added more data and covered a wider area. So a mix of portrait and landscape panels were planned and shot with the same scope and camera. Now every pixel represents at least 3-4h of integration, some have more. All the above were shot from Bortle 2-3 sites where I traveled sometimes even for an hour of exposure. To the RGB data I added 17.5h of Ha, same story with the panels. Some were oriented N-S, others E-W. These were shot with the SW 72ED and the ASI1600 from home and Bortle ~7. Then I figured out I still had time and I planned and shot 9 more panels of luminance with the 72ED and ASI1600, each consisting of 1h of exposure. I combined all of these into an image, processed it and for the Orion nebula and Running Man nebula I also blended some data I shot last season with the 130PDS and ASI1600 from home. Below it's my first final version of all data combined. You can watch it in full resolution on astrobin: https://www.astrobin.com/full/jni0w8/ or Flickr: https://flic.kr/p/2iBGUXq

Evening all - decided to finally publish this been returning to on and off for a while and decided not much more i can do with it. Widefield RGB stars are a struggle still for me, wont be getting any HA for a while which i could have used to better control so decided it's time to jump in as is! It comprises of some relatively short LRGB taken on a wide-field Rokinon 135 - I then created a composite luminance layer from scratch featuring the Rokinon and FSQ data for each object. Totalling about 34 hours of exposure. I blended the composite lum with the Rokinon RGB and then reinforced this further with some colour from the original stand-alone images. Hope you enjoy. Paddy