NGC2179 and a surprise.

[ollypenrice]

By anybody's standards, NGC2179 ia a gorgeous little nebula. This old image is at about 0.9"PP with a TEC140:

How about in widefield?  Honestly... not all that promising. This is a basic log stretch of a good recent run in the RASA 8/ASI2600/NEQ6 (because the Avalon Linear has gone belly-up for now.)  Inspiring? Maybe not.

 

I was wrong!  Given lots of TLC and modern processing, there was an awful lot more to this dataset than met the eye. I've never been so surprised. Don't underestimate your data! The image below is the one above, with no 'painting.'

Capture and stacking by Paul Kummer, my post precessing.

Edit: The triangular open cluster, NGC7142, is interesting because it's heavily reddened by surrounding dust, but also because it has a large number of 'blue stragglers' which I discovered while checking up on the cluster's colour. 

Olly

 

 

Edited August 17, 2023 by ollypenrice

[peter shah]

wow gorgeous job on those Olly

[Elp]

I'd initially say impossible but you are quite good at this.

[ollypenrice]

I can't get rid of the duplicate image at the bottom.  Any ideas?

Olly

[JOC]

8 minutes ago, ollypenrice said:

I can't get rid of the duplicate image at the bottom.  Any ideas?

It looks like it has uploaded twice.  Click the three little dots in the top right of the posting in question and click edit from the drop down then check the files uploaded with the posting.  You should be able to click the dustbin or X in the uploaded files list on the file itself and delete the second file if it's uploaded twice.   If not then I don't know.

[ollypenrice]

15 minutes ago, JOC said:

It looks like it has uploaded twice.  Click the three little dots in the top right of the posting in question and click edit from the drop down then check the files uploaded with the posting.  You should be able to click the dustbin or X in the uploaded files list on the file itself and delete the second file if it's uploaded twice.   If not then I don't know.

Thanks. That worked.

Olly

[tomato]

That’s a great job on the data. I think the modern processing tools are a real win-win. In expert hands they can reveal so much with deep data sets, but beginners with much shorter integration time sets can get a great image without too much work which can only boost their motivation to progress further with AP.

BTW, what happened to the Avalon, if you don’t mind me asking?

[ollypenrice]

1 hour ago, tomato said:

That’s a great job on the data. I think the modern processing tools are a real win-win. In expert hands they can reveal so much with deep data sets, but beginners with much shorter integration time sets can get a great image without too much work which can only boost their motivation to progress further with AP.

BTW, what happened to the Avalon, if you don’t mind me asking?

The Avalon stopped slewing or tracking one night. I changed from PC control to handset control and when I ran through the setup process it got to the point where the handset said slewing...  but it wasn't. It was as silent as the grave. I tried another handset and another mother board but nothing changed. Just once, during this fiddling, it slewed briefly in Dec and sounded as healthy as usual, so I suspect a loss of current to the motors from a loose connection. I need to work out how to open it up but I haven't found any explanation on that, so far on the net.  

Olly

[SyedT]

29 minutes ago, ollypenrice said:

The Avalon stopped slewing or tracking one night. I changed from PC control to handset control and when I ran through the setup process it got to the point where the handset said slewing...  but it wasn't. It was as silent as the grave. I tried another handset and another mother board but nothing changed. Just once, during this fiddling, it slewed briefly in Dec and sounded as healthy as usual, so I suspect a loss of current to the motors from a loose connection. I need to work out how to open it up but I haven't found any explanation on that, so far on the net.  

Olly

Is it doing it in both axes? My M-Uno stopped slewing in RA and it turned out that the belt had disintegrated! If it's both axes then very unlikely, but just something to keep in mind I suppose.

[maw lod qan]

Excellent images Sir. Really eye catching!

[Blauvista]

Very nice results - both the close-up and widefield view - I am always amazed what a RASA will pick-up if you put it under a relatively dark sky ...  and you are right, NGC2179 is a very nice little nebula.  Is the TEC140 data narrowband or RGB?

[Laurin Dave]

Fabulous image Olly...  and what a difference the new tools make..  Typo in the title though.. its NGC7129 as per annotation on the TEC image. 

Dave

[tomato]

6 hours ago, SyedT said:

Is it doing it in both axes? My M-Uno stopped slewing in RA and it turned out that the belt had disintegrated! If it's both axes then very unlikely, but just something to keep in mind I suppose.

I remember a thread on this topic, if I recall correctly a bad batch of drive belts were the culprit. However, wouldn’t Olly hear the motor running if just the belt had failed?

[ollypenrice]

2 hours ago, tomato said:

I remember a thread on this topic, if I recall correctly a bad batch of drive belts were the culprit. However, wouldn’t Olly hear the motor running if just the belt had failed?

Yes, I think I would. It just is totally dead, as in no current.

Olly

[ollypenrice]

8 hours ago, Blauvista said:

Very nice results - both the close-up and widefield view - I am always amazed what a RASA will pick-up if you put it under a relatively dark sky ...  and you are right, NGC2179 is a very nice little nebula.  Is the TEC140 data narrowband or RGB?

Thanks. The TEC data are LRGB.

Olly

[Xsubmariner]

Just wonderful. It’s amazing how software advances now allow so much more information to be extracted from the data set.

[gorann]

Oh yes, it is amazing what you can do with the data once you get rid of the stars Olly! I imaged the same area with my RASA8 rig a few month ago, but it was full moon so I used NBZ filter for Ha and Oiii. Interestingly, the result is quite different from your RGB, showing that RGB is great in catching faint dust. However, the NB image revealed that there is also a SNR there.

Cheers, Göran

 

[ollypenrice]

11 hours ago, gorann said:

Oh yes, it is amazing what you can do with the data once you get rid of the stars Olly! I imaged the same area with my RASA8 rig a few month ago, but it was full moon so I used NBZ filter for Ha and Oiii. Interestingly, the result is quite different from your RGB, showing that RGB is great in catching faint dust. However, the NB image revealed that there is also a SNR there.

Cheers, Göran

 

That's very interesting! The line of the SNR's arc is just visible in our image as well. I overlapped a screen grab of yours onto it because I wasn't sure how they lined up. Also interesting (and reassuring) is that some reds show through our dust where your image shows the Ha to be strongest. I was a little concerned that my processing might have invented this but your images shows that I didn't.

Thanks,

Olly

[gorann]

If you are interested Olly you could make a try of combining the images. Not sure how good they overlap. Here is a tif of my final version.

20230312 NGC7129 RASA1+2 PS27(nebula tamed by curve).tif