A Slew of Slooh Images

[Buzzard75]

I was doing a write up for my club about the Slooh service and thought I would share it here as well, with the images I've processed over the past week and a half. Between all the LRGB frames, there probably isn't much more than an hours worth of data in each image. Some have considerably less. You can of course put as much time as you want into them. The presets discussed below in the write-up are typically binned 3x3 for LRGB, but you can run a mission specifically for 2x2 binned Luminance frames. This was generally what I did in most cases and then just drizzled everything back to 1x1 scale before combing. All images were processed in Pixinsight and some ended up doing a little post processing in Photoshop. Don't ask me which ones, I don't remember. On to the write-up or skip to the photos, your choice!

Begin write-up:

Over the last week and a half, I have been actively using an online telescope control subscription service called Slooh. I have been curious about the service for a while. I obviously love imaging deep sky objects, processing those images and sharing them with others. Lately though, I had not been able to do much imaging of my own due to personal conflicts or weather conflicts. Since imaging objects myself wasn’t an option for the foreseeable future, I decided to finally check out Slooh and see what it was all about. They just happened to be running a free 7-day trial when I signed up last week, so it was perfect timing. The free trial appears to still be going on as of this posting. As I said, Slooh is an online telescope control subscription service, so there is a fee involved. There are three tiers to choose from, Student ($50/year), Apprentice ($100/year), and Astronomer ($300/year). The 7-day trial is for an Apprentice membership. After a few days though, it was obvious to me that I was really going to enjoy it and get a lot of use out of it, so I upgraded and paid for the full Astronomer tier.

 The different tiers give you different abilities and access to different types of data. The Student tier is allowed to schedule five basic missions for any of the Slooh 1000 catalog of objects. So, what is a mission? Simply put, a mission is an imaging timeslot on the telescope schedule for a specific object. With a basic mission, you pick an object from the catalog and a timeslot and telescope are automatically selected for you. All of the image exposure settings are also preset for you based on the target. As a Student, you  have access to PNG files of the images that you can download for yourself. A PNG is about the same quality as a JPEG. The Student tier is intended more for schools and clubs doing observations and those who want to look at objects live. The Apprentice tier includes the same abilities of the Student, including the five basic missions, but allows you to schedule an additional advanced mission where you can pick the specific telescope and even specific coordinates of what you want to image, as well as which exposure presets to use. You also gain access to the FITS files for your mission. FITS files are raw data files from the camera and are very important for people who post process images. The Astronomer tier is all of that, except instead of one advanced mission, you can schedule up to five advanced missions in addition to the five basic missions. With all of the tiers, you gain access to watching the images live as they are taken from all of the telescopes. They also do live star parties during special events that you can tune into and hear professional astronomers talk about the night sky and answer your questions.

 There's a lot more to the website than just imaging objects and live streams from the telescopes that you can't really see or get a feel for unless you subscribe though. One of those things are the Quests and how detailed they are. Quests a series of objectives and are designed to try to teach you something about astronomy as you complete those objectives. Each objective is more or less to image a specific object. In order to continue to the next objective and complete the entire Quest though, there are simple knowledge checks at the end with a question or two about the objective you just completed. There are some Quests that you can complete in a day and others that will take a week, a month and possibly even years to complete. Of course, all the quests are optional. You don’t have to do a single one of them and you can just read them or complete them at your leisure if you so choose. Along with the information in the Quests there are also a lot of Guides on the website. These Guides provide even more in depth educational information about the history of astronomy and the objects in the Slooh 1000 catalog of objects.

 As you interact with the website by imaging objects, scheduling missions, completing Quests, and contributing to the community discussions, you’ll earn Gravity Points. Right now, there isn't a use for them other than "leveling up" your account and for bragging rights. They may implement something further down the road for gravity points, but they have nothing planned at the moment. The different "levels" are signified by different astronomers throughout history and there is information about each one of them in the Guides as well. I am currently at the Su Song level. Su Song was described as a scientist, mathematician, statesman, astronomer, cartographer, horologist, medical doctor, pharmacologist, mineralogist, zoologist, botanist, mechanical and architectural engineer, poet, antiquarian, and ambassador of the Song Dynasty (960–1279). An extremely talented person.

 It has been extremely fun over the past week and a half collecting the data for these images and processing them. Even for me as someone who knows a fair bit about astronomy, I’ve actually learned a few things. The best part for me so far though has been seeing some things that I may never be able to see unless I take a trip half way around the world to the southern hemisphere. Again, I hope you enjoy the images and I look forward to working more with this great service and providing more great images of deep sky objects!

 

End write-up. Now pretty pictures! Seven of these are from the northern hemisphere and the rest are from the southern hemisphere or at least southerly latitudes. We have:

Barnard 33 - The Horsehead Nebula
M1 - The Crab Nebula
M42 - The Orion Nebula
M51 - The Whirlpool Galaxy
M81 - Bode's Galaxy
M104 - The Sombrero Galaxy
NGC2392 - The Eskimo Nebula
NGC3532 - The Wishing Well Cluster
IC2944 - The Running Chicken Nebula (part of)
NGC2070 - The Tarantula Nebula
NGC5128 - Centaurus A Galaxy

Edited January 30, 2021 by Buzzard75

[irandar]

Thanks for the detailed explanation of Slooh services. They do not seem to explain it so well. I have been using Telescope Live to get sets of about 12 fits (HSO and LRGB) for about $1. Then stacking and editing with Affinity Photo. It gives practice with processing but without the excitement of scheduling your own mission. I would want to get fits files for editing. Does Slooh send a set of fits files for stacking and editing? Best regards and thanks again.