The Space Jockey - NGC 1925 & Friends in the LMC

[AndysAstroPix]

Remember the ‘Space Jockey’ from the derelict spaceship in the first Alien movie?

Found him in the Large Magellenic Cloud with NGC 1925 & Friends. 😀

 

This image is a collaboration with my astro buddy Paul whose gear has a remarkably similar FOV to mine. 

Paul has rural Bortle 2/3 skies, and after plate solving a sub of mine to orient his camera, took nice clean RGB for the stars using the following...

SVX80-3SV with SFF4-80T field flattener,

ZWO ASI2600MC Pro camera,

32 X 120 second subs,

shot with Voyager.

 

I took the Narrowband data from my light polluted suburban Bortle 6/7 location in Melbourne with a Tak TOA-130, Tak NJP mount and a QSI 6162 camera with Chroma NB filters.

 

Frames:

Chroma Ha 2" 5nm: 30x900" (7h 30') ISO30 bin 1x1

Chroma OIII 3nm O3: 51x900" (12h 45') bin 1x1

Chroma SII 5nm Chroma SII: 24x900" (6h)

Integration: 26h 15'

There appear to be very few if any stand alone images of this fascinating target, that when rotated 90 degrees CCW also resembles an olympic swimmer on the starting blocks, or a busy cyclist! 🤩

Also of interest is an almost golden, irregular shaped globular cluster at 8 o’clock, and the distant galaxy in the top right cnr.

Tidal gravitational forces from the LMC's companion, the SMC and the Milky Way have resulted in many of these wacky irregular shaped nebulae present in this distorted barred spiral galaxy.

It’s an amazing region for us Southern Hemisphere folk to target! 🇦🇺

[MarsG76]

That looks awesome, well done....

[AndysAstroPix]

20 hours ago, MarsG76 said:

That looks awesome, well done....

Thanks very much MarsG76! 🤩

[The Lazy Astronomer]

Nice - it's got something of a funky psychedelic look to it 😁

[AndysAstroPix]

2 hours ago, The Lazy Astronomer said:

Nice - it's got something of a funky psychedelic look to it 😁

Ha ha, awesome- to quote Bowie,  “We know Major Tom’s a junkie...” 🤪