New year, new reprocess of my M51 data from 2021! My take last year left something to be desired. The photometric color calibration did not usually work well for me, so this year I wanted to give it another try with the spectrophotometric color calibration, in addition to the improved… Continue Reading... "M51, yet again"
Having just spent an entire Saturday working on an image, I thought I would give a synopsis of what it takes to create a deep space image. Many people are not aware of the details, patience, statistics, and computer processing power that is required. Many people think that you just… Continue Reading... "What it takes to create a deep space image"
NGC 6740 is a barred spiral galaxy 27 million light years away in the Andromeda constellation. This is a galaxy that I rarely see imaged, even though it is over 10 arcminutes in length. After imaging most of the big, common targets, I wanted to give some time to a… Continue Reading... "NGC 7640"
Possibly my favorite part of the hobby of astronomy is the continual improvement of a wide range of skills needed to produce images. The image processing stage makes all of the patience of hardware acquisition, maintenance, fine-tuning, and operation worth it. I would like to take my favorite targets, the… Continue Reading... "My journey in processing, featuring the Deer Lick"
NGC 1499, also known as Sharpless-2 220, is a quite large emission nebula in Perseus, almost the same apparent size as the Andromeda galaxy at 2.5° in length. It is about 1,000 light years from Earth. Its size is estimated to be 60 light years, wide enough to fit 2,000… Continue Reading... "NGC 1499, California Nebula"
Messier 34 is a large open cluster of stars about 250 million years old. This cluster lies in Perseus, and it is estimated to be about 1,500 light years away. This cluster contains around 400 stars of Solar mass size and at least 19 white dwarfs. This image is composed… Continue Reading... "M34"
You ever have one of those projects that just gets away from you. 🙂 From the end of July to the beginning of September, I collected 11 nights’ worth of data on this target, getting almost 49 hours in total exposure, my new record for a single target. Since I… Continue Reading... "M27"
The Elephant’s Trunk nebula, IC 1396A, is a dark nebula, consisting of interstellar dust, in the larger emission nebula IC 1396. This nebula lies about 2,400 light years away in Cepheus. The Elephant’s Trunk is an active star forming region, with very young stars discovered within it in 2003. The… Continue Reading... "Elephant’s Trunk Nebula"
With all of the recent excitement over seeing a supernova happen in real time in M101, what does one look like after 10,000 years? The Veil Nebula is a supernova remnant in Cygnus, about 2,400 light years away. The star this came from was probably 20 times the mass of… Continue Reading... "Eastern Veil Nebula"
I typically shoot at native resolution with my ASI2600MC for any single target. Recently, I’ve started collecting data for my first attempt at a mosaic, a two-panel spread over the Eastern Veil Nebula. With frames from my camera being about 6000×4000 pixels, and needing to collect two panels’ worth of… Continue Reading... "OSC binning in PixInsight"
