Image of the Month – October 2012

This month’s Image of the Month is in my opinion the most underrated and unappreciated deep-sky image of all time – amateur or professional.  It hasn’t even appeared as an APOD.  Why on Earth not?  Because I guess it is not exactly what one would call a “pretty picture”.  There isn’t a vast assortment of colour on view.  But it is the most incredible achievement for an amateur imager to come up with such a dramatic panorama of the Integrated Flux Nebula as the one shown here – and let’s just get this into perspective, this isn’t Hubble data or Keck telescope data, this has been acquired by Rogelio Bernal Andreo in California with a Takahashi FSQ-106.  How staggering is that?  Perhaps the most outstanding deep-sky image to-date in view of the difficulty of the subject, and the clarity and the depth to which it has been captured – utterly superb work Andreo – and a very fitting NFO Image of the Month for sure 🙂

I see that the image does not reproduce well on the small size I can post on this site.  For the real deal look at the original Rogelio version here.