Tracking Down the IFN using World Wide Telescope

[Knight of Clear Skies]

Here's something I've been playing with that I thought might be useful for imagers, a possible method for tracking down regions of the IFN suitable for capture. Here's a screen grab of one of my images in World Wide Telescope:

From the dropdown at the bottom I've selected the SFD Infra-Red Dust Map. By adjusting the crossfade control next to it I can see the brightest region of dust matches up well with the IFN captured in my image. Here's my original capture for comparison:

It's not a particularly deep image, shot unguided with a DSLR and only 1h40m of data, but if I can get guiding going I should be able to go usefully deeper.

In the test above, there seems to be a good correspondence between IR and visual brightness. It also give me some idea of targets I could go after, by checking for similar brightness levels in the dust map against what I've already achieved. I was thinking this might be useful for other imagers, either to find new targets or to help frame a shot. Regions around Taurus, Aries and Pegasus look particularly promising.

To get my image into World Wide Telescope I first uploaded it to Flickr, then added it to the Astrometry group. Some magic then happens, the astrometry.net server plate solves the image and adds a comment listing the bright stars and DSOs in view - at the bottom is a link to view the image in World Wide Telescope. There must be other ways of doing this but I don't know what they are. Oddly, if I upload and plate-solve directly at nova.astrometry.net it doesn't seem to give me a WWT link, although I do get one to Google Sky! I also see there is a Windows client for WWT although I haven't tried that yet.

Hope this is of some use to people, the Ha map could also be handy.