SGL 2023 Challenge 4 - Galaxies

[Minhlead]

6 hours ago, petevasey said:

That's a cracking good image, but I'm slightly puzzled by the date mentioned.  19th May was the date the supernova was discovered by Koichi Itagaki.  And it certainly hadn't faded after a few days - I imaged it (in Astronomical twilight) on 24th May and it had brightened considerably as seen below.  QSI683 on RC10. Luminance 11 x 5 minutes, RGB each 5 x 5 minutes, all binned 2x2.

Date correction needed  perhaps?

Cheers, Peter

Thanks, Peter. I stand corrected. The data was accquired on May 20. I saw my image on astrobin was posted on May 20 and thought the data probably acquired the night before. But yeah, it seems I was so eager and process the image just a few hours after the data taken. Thanks for weeding out the error.

About the fade out of the supernova, I did not participate in the follow up observations (just look at the spectral of the supernova the following nights so I do not have a clear perspective of time. But yeah, after this image was taken, the supernova goes up considerably in magnitude and then faded away red shifted (probably in the span of a week or so).

 

Edited June 21, 2023 by Minhlead

[Lee_P]

My entry is The Pinwheel Galaxy -- very popular at the moment, but in my defense I'd been imaging it for a month before the supernova! After that discovery I just kept going until I'd collected 70 hours of good quality RGB data using my OSC camera. I then collected 30 hours using my Optolong L-Ultimate filter, extracted the H-alpha, and added it into the RGB image. The result is 100 hours of OSC HaRGB data, all taken from my back garden in Bristol's Bortle 8 city centre.

 

The whole project took two months. I had to learn a few new tricks along the way as I'd never handled such a large quantity of data -- the RGB component alone is 2100 subframes of 120s each, totalling 102GB. PixInsight struggled with the pre-processing, and took over 85 hours to do the number crunching! This was also the first time I'd combined H-alpha with RGB data. I spent the best part of two days on the processing 😵 It ended up being by far my most ambitious astro project to date. I've written the experience up in more detail on my website.

* 21 April to 16 June 2023 to (8 weeks)
* Bristol, UK (Bortle 8 )
* Telescope: Askar 130PHQ Flatfield Astrograph
* Camera: ZWO ASI 2600MC-PRO
* Mount: Sky-Watcher EQ6-R PRO
* Guide: William Optics 50mm Guidescope with 1.25″ RotoLock; ZWO ASI 120MM Mini
* Control: ASIAIR Plus
* Software: PixInsight, Lightroom
* Filters:
– No filter 2100 x 120 seconds (70 hours)
– Optolong L-Ultimate 900 x 120 seconds (30 hours)

Total exposure time: 100 hours

By Lee Pullen

 

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This animation shows my nearest data before and after the supernova.

 

And finally, just for fun and following @powerlord's fine example from earlier in this thread, here's Man with Concrete Block Pier vs Hubble. I think it's pretty neat seeing the supernova appear, as well as the glowing hydrogen.

 

 

Edited June 22, 2023 by Lee_P

[Minhlead]

Phewwww. It's here at last, just on time! This one is specifically taken for the competition when I got the chance to have a few personal hours with the big gun.

Below is the M63 Sunflower Galaxy taken in 2 nights 18-19/June 2023. The data set is a mere 66x120s with only the UV IR cut filter.

The scope is CDK600 with QHY168C camera.

Edited June 25, 2023 by Minhlead

[Dan_Paris]

Imaging galaxies at 49°N around the summer solstice may seem foolish, but here is an attempt during the past week on the Draco trio (NGC 5981, NGC 5982  et NGC 5985), over three nights. Overall 7h20 of luminance data and 80min of color data.

Right-click for full resolution:

 

 

clear skies,

 

Dan

 

Technical details

200/800 custom Newtonian astrograph with Romano Zen optics and carbon fiber tube
AP900 CP4 mount on Losmandy HD tripod

ASI183mm (0.66"/pix)
TS 2.5" Riccardi-Wynne corrector
ZWO LRGB filters
Guiding : ZWO OAG + ASI120mm mini + AsiairV1
Luminance : 440 *60sec
Chrominance : 20*60sec for R and G, 40*60 sec for B
Conditions : Bortle 7 skies in Paris' suburbs, rather good seeing (1.86" median FWHM on the luminance stack)
Processing with Pixinsight

Edited June 26, 2023 by Dan_Paris

[WolfieGlos]

Hopefully this is still accepted for the competition, what with the forum outage for the last few days. I was hoping to add more time to this image, but work, homelife, weather and the Moon had other ideas.

Since I last posted this image back in May, I have added a bit of deconvolution on the image which has sharpened it up a bit so have entered this version below. I was a little unsure whether to enter it given the number of phenomenal images already entered, but hey, why not?

The DSLR has picked up galaxies in the PGC catalogue and other even fainter catalogs. I can see 2, maybe 3 distant galaxy clusters. Second image with the new scope, imaged across 5 sessions; 10 frames on 9th May, 32 frames on 12th May, 28 frames on 13th May, 45 frames on 15th May, 39 frames on 17th May. Some discarded for the final stack.

Canon EOS 800D (Astro modded) +  Starfield 102ED with 0.8 reducer. No filters.
Sky Watcher HEQ5 with Belt Mod
ZWO ASI120mm Mini + ZWO 30mm F/4
Frames - 144 x 300s (12:00:00), ISO 400
Calibrations - 50 bias, 40 flats, 6 darks.

Stacked in ASTAP, processed with SIRIL, AstroDeNoisePY and GIMP. Minor crop for stacking artifacts, FL = 570mm.

 

 

Edited July 1, 2023 by WolfieGlos

[Elp]

Me too, hopefully mine can be included as I uploaded it Thu afternoon so it wasn't included in the second attempt to site upload.

Comments welcome here:

This challenge always attracts many excellent submissions and this year follows on with the trend. Some truly excellent pieces of work herein.

I decided to divert from the general consensus, something I’ve wanted to do for a number of seasons but it’s always difficult with short nights and non astronomical darkness, but I never like to leave a clear night un-imaged so even whilst imaging right next to the moon I wanted to do this… try and image the most amount of galaxies in one wide FOV image.

This is my first mosaic.

Originally when planning this mosaic I went nuts and wanted to include the whole Coma Berenices region downward, but it was a 75 panel mosaic, impossible for one season (and truly will take years) and I can’t image the whole thing as maybe half is below the horizon, checking the framing would also be a nightmare so I decided to simplify and start with that often imaged target Markarian’s Chain, a wonderful target in itself but also an ideal datum point to start from and work outward.

The original plan was to image luminence with one scope, and r, g, b with another, I nearly managed a 20 minute per panel pass of the colour but stopped short on the blue due to time (lower panels set too quickly after dark). The weather’s been decent of late during the day but come night the clouds like to roll in, and if not that the wind decides to turn up and the usual suspect the moon is where I want to image like it reads my mind. The last session I got fed up and imaged next to the moon, data wasn’t bad, wasn’t the best either but I decided not to use it. So every time I’ve imaged wide with my excellent Z61, my second setup has also been imaging but I decided not to use that data, mainly because it was a smaller field of view and trying to match everything will have been a massive undertaking. Even this simple end result rough as it is with many defects (and I may have destroyed a few trillions of innocent distant civilisations in the process when cleaning up the image) took probably longer than the image acquisition as it was stacked and pre processed in Siril and aligned and colour matched and cleaned up manually in PS. No auto stitching software worked when cross referencing the auto stitched images object positions with my manually aligned image and referencing Stellarium as the auto software scaled and rotated panels in odd ways causing distortion.

So in the end I only managed a 3 x 3, 9 panel mosaic approximately 8 x 6 degrees FOV at 1 hour per panel (dropped to 54 minutes with final stack rejection).

The image won’t win any awards but I’m submitting it, it’s my first attempt at a mosaic, and my first attempt doing a wider than normal field of view, hopefully some viewing it will like it, even better if it inspires others to attempt similar. 

Think I may add to it per season……

Best viewed at 100 percent, I’d recommend you try to count as many smudges you can see on the plain image first. Once you’ve done that come back to the below.

For reference this is the astrometry plate solve on a lower res version, around 317 objects annotated:

And by my rough observation this many are visible (160 odd), think this is quite the result for such a short imaging time. It’s amazing what’s possible nowadays.

[MartinB]

This challenge is now closed.  The results will be announced in the next 2 weeks