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Photos: Nebulas

Simeis 147 and surroundings

Posted: December 8th, 2011


Simeis 147, a supernova remnant also known as Sharpless 2-240, is an object typically photographed with narrowband filters, because under visible light it just appears too "poor" in comparison, mainly due to the fact that this object is extremely faint when imaged through RGB filters - and not too bright when using narrowband filters either! Narrowband data however deprives us from viewing the many other things happening around it.

Most narrowband+broadband compositions I've seen (usually H-Alpha + RGB or H-Alpha + LRGB) haven't been able to "fix" that, so I decided to give it a try, also expanding the typical already-wide FOV, to hopefully capture and visually document more of what's around.

The image being presented above includes the entire field I photographed, in a 3x1 mosaic, but down here you can see a composition that focuses on the supernova remnant itself:

Successfully combining narrowband data (H-Alpha in this case) and (L)RGB data can be tricky. One of the usual results is that, since H-Alpha data tends to produce very small stars, when combined with broadband data, the resulting image often presents a rather severe ringing around the stars. Also, some conventional techniques rely on mixing H-Alpha with the red (R) and blue (B) data, but in this case, my RGB data was rather poor so I couldn't rely on just this technique. Therefore, for this particular image I followed a number of conventional as well as non-conventional methods that proved to be rather successful in producing an image that visually documents this area of the sky. Also, as usual in many of my recent images, a multi-scale approach dominated post-processing, in particular to bring out the fainter details that hide behind the swarm of stars.

My daughter says this supernova remnant looks like a Christmas tree ornament, although I kind of see a piggy's head instead! :-)

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From the Pleiades to the Hyades

Posted: November 6th, 2011


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Here's one of the projects that kept me busy the month of October.

It's a 12 pane mosaic of the area that goes from the Pleiades (M45) all the way to the Hyades. An area that we know well it's quite "dusty" around M45, in part contributed by the Taurus molecular cloud, but that as this image shows, and as expected although not commonly imaged, it really extends all the way to the famous V-shaped open cluster that lies behind the red giant Aldebaran.

I wasn't quite sure in which section I should post it: Star clusters or nebulae. Clearly the reference objects are two open clusters - M45 and the Hyades - both of which are in fact visible naked eye even from moderately light polluted skies. Yet, the predominant structures in the image are the dusty clouds that swirl across the entire field of view. I guess that's the problem with very wide field views: they get a bit of everything!

My favorite presentation is vertical (portrait), as this is how I get to see this part of the sky as it comes from the eastern horizon, although for presentation purposes, the smaller version up there is shown in landscape orientation.

As usual, capturing this data required me some "unusual" amount of driving to dark sites, this time reaching over 1,650 miles.

Data was rather minimal almost by design (click on the "Show image details" below to see the number of subexposures, etc). On top of that, transparency was quite poor during the whole month, and I was getting barely 21.1 ~ 21.2 SQM readings every night at the dark site I usually go to capture the data, while the average at the site is around 21.5, and all the way to up to 21.8 on exceptional nights. Still, despite all that, I think the image came out okay in general, and pretty good considering the amount of data and transparency conditions. More data wouldn't have hurt, particularly color data, but what's new? :-)

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Overcast in the Constellation of Aries

Posted: November 1st, 2011


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The constellation Aries is bathed with numerous dust clouds. This image shows a small region - small in comparison to the constellation - near the also dusty constellations of Taurus and Perseus.

The dusty clouds you see in the image may feel a bit soft, prompting the trained observer to think that noise reduction was heavily applied. However, that's not the case in this image. Although I did apply a bit of noise reduction during the post-processing, it was in fact very mild, and the reason for the clouds having that soft appearance is because in the original data these structures were already lacking the tri-dimensionality and wispy appearance one would usually expect.

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Clouds of Perseus

Posted: October 23rd, 2011


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This image is a collaborative project between Bob Caton, Eric Zbinden, Al Howard and myself. A 2x5 mosaic of sorts. Four FSQ106 scopes, two SBIG STL11k and two FLI Proline 16803... Some insanity and a lot of coffee (for me at least, the others I think only drink Red Bull :-).

128 hours of data. Many more hours accumulated in driving to darksites - mainly to the DARC Observatory and the Central Nevada Star Sarty - and over 7,500 miles driven, just by Al, Eric and myself.

I did the post-processing for this version, and it probably took me over 12 hours to put everything together up until the final version.

There was a "deadline" for this image, so we had to workon this one around the clock to the point at times it didn't even feel this was a hobby but a job, but still, now I think it was well worth it. Of course, the image is not perfect, but what is?

Colors are stronger than what I'd usually process them but there's a reason for that: the image will be printed on a 14 feet wide duratran-like transparency for a lightbox display at some upcoming event, so I prepped it for that by pushing saturation more than whatI usually do, and then figured I'd let it stay that way for regular"web" presentation since it was looking cool enough that way.

I must say I've enjoyed very much to work on this collaborative project, and I hope there'll be more to come!

This image was selected as NASA's Astronomy Picture of the Day on October 21, 2011

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The Teapot in Sagittarius

Posted: September 14th, 2011


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This is a 16 pane mosaic of the "Teapot", a famous asterism in the constellation Sagittarius.

I started this project early June from DARC. I didn't continue capturing data for it during the GSSP early July because at 41 degrees of latitude, this object was just way too low in the sky (not that it isn't at 36-38 degrees).

So it was only during my visit to Spain that I finished it during several visits to the Pinar de Araceli in the province of Granada.

Stitching the 16 panes for this mosaic turned out to be harder than what I had anticipated - and I've done a few mosaic to know what it takes. The good news is that the new GradientsMergeMosaic tool in PixInsight (which I didn't use for this mosaic) is just amazing, so stitching new mosaics should be much much easier regardless.

Also, the are of the Lagoon nebula wasn't in the plan originally, but I ended up deciding to add it, from the macromosaic I captured last year of the "From Rho Op to M16" area. The original framing only included the Teapot area and nothing else, but, although the framing may feel a bit unbalanced now, I feel the Lagoon gives some sense of position and reference that I personally like.

Here's a small version of the image with the asterism and most significant objects:

And here is the same but at a larger size.

 

The Volcano Nebula (IFN, M81 and M82)

Posted: May 4th, 2011


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This image covers a "small" area of the mosaic I did in 2010, but in this case, spending more hours on this particular area, and preserving its original resolution.

The field of view shows part of the area of IFN that Steve Mandel named The Volcano Nebula near the famous M81 and M82 galaxies.

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NGC 2170 widefield

Posted: February 1st, 2011


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This field from the constellation Monoceros, featuring the bright nebula NGC 2170 in the middle, is an incredible mix of nebula types: reflection nebula (the blue areas), emission nebula (reddish) and dark nebula (black), all bathed in scattered dust around the area.One challenge when imaging this field is that the geostationary superhighway crosses right in the middle, which in this case, it created an average of 4 to 6 satellite strikes on each of the subframes I took. Fortunately, using a sigma clipping combine to stack the different subframes was able to get rid of each and every strike in the final image.

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M78 versus LDN 1622

Posted: December 6th, 2010


From the APOD: Bright stars, clouds of dust and glowing nebulae decorate this cosmic scene, a skyscape just north of Orion's belt. Close to the plane of our Milky Way Galaxy, the wide field view spans about 5.5 degrees. Striking bluish M78, a reflection nebula, is at the left. M78's tint is due to dust preferentially reflecting the blue light of hot, young stars. In colorful contrast, the red sash of glowing hydrogen gas sweeping through the center is part of the region's faint but extensive emission nebula known as Barnard's Loop. At right, a dark dust cloud forms a prominent silhouette cataloged as LDN 1622. While M78 and the complex Barnard's Loop are some 1,500 light-years away, LDN 1622 is likely to be much closer, only about 500 light-years distant from our fair planet Earth.

Personal notes about the image will be added shortly...

Polaris and the North Celestial Pole

Posted: November 10th, 2010


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Here's a 2x2 mosaic wide field of the North Celestial Pole, featuring one of the best friends of astrophotographers in the Northern Hemisphere: Polaris. In fact, for us nomadic imagers, Polaris is not only our friend, but at the beginning of each session, we get on our knees and what may seem as an imager doing polar alignment, we're in fact PRAYING to the Northern Star that the session goes well!

The image also features a copious amount of galactic cirrus (some of it displaying some very cool structures), one of the oldest known open clusters (NGC 188, at the bottom-middle), and Delta Um (middle right, the second star in Ursa Minor's tail)

If you'd like to see where the North Celestial Pole actually is, you can see it here:

The data was captured over the course of two nights next to the DARC Observatory under 21.3 mag skies (that's at the Zenith), average transparency and bad seeing, and the processing was roughly 75% PixInsight and 25% CS5. DARC is around 120 miles from my home, so that makes this a 480 miles image ;-) Not a lot of data (1h lum and 18m each color filter per frame) as I started the project when the Moon was already getting bit and setting late.

The image is also a testimony of how nice the polar scope of the EM400 mount is, as that's the only method I used both nights to polar align (no drift, etc) and as many of you know, imaging near the pole requires a good polar alignment, but of course, this image is not near the pole but on the pole itself! The forgiving resolution of the FSQ does help, but still, not bad at all.

As a friend said, in this image "north is not up", "north is IN"! :-)

As always, I identify a number of "I shouldn't have done that" or "I should have done this that other way" during the processing, but overall, and considering how seldom this area has been photographed, I think it does it justice somehow as a display of how the area looks like, and I'm happy with the results.

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Orion, from Head to Toes

Posted: October 22nd, 2010


From the APOD: Cradled in cosmic dust andglowing hydrogen, stellar nurseries in Orion the Hunter lie at the edgeof a giant molecular cloud some 1,500 light-years away. Spanning nearly 25 degrees, this breath-taking vista stretches across the well-known constellation from head to toe (left to right). The Great Orion Nebula, the closest large star forming region, is right of center. To its left are the Horsehead Nebula, M78, and Orion's belt stars.  In this 3x8 mosaic of broadband telescopic images, additional image data acquired with a narrow hydrogen alpha filter was used to bring out the pervasive tendrils of energized atomic hydrogen gas and the arc of the giant Barnard's Loop.

Personal notes about the image to be added shortly...

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