New Forest Observatory ®

The deep-sky image for this week is one of mine 🙂  It is perhaps not one of the best-looking images that I have taken, but it is one of my favourites due to the amount of time I spent in getting the data.  This is still the most time (and data) intensive image I have produced to date (but it will be surpassed once the mini-WASP is let loose to do its thing in earnest).  This image of course shows the famous Veil Nebula in Cygnus, a supernova remnant, and a most beautiful object.  All imaging was undertaken using the Sky 90/M26C one-shot colour CCD combination.  I started on this marathon imaging run by just taking the Northern section of the Veil in RGB.  I spent a LONG time in getting this data (around 8 hours or so) and to be frank, when I saw the results I was less than impressed.  The filaments were a bit fuzzy and not very well defined at all, and the image just “looked wrong” with the bottom half missing.  As I didn’t have an OIII filter at the time I ordered one up and in the meantime I imaged the lower half of the Veil nebula in RGB, around another 6 hours or so.  The OIII filter arrived and I imaged both halves of the veil in OIII and then I did the same again thing for H-alpha.  We’re now talking about 30-40 hours of data on this one object alone.  After Noel Carboni put in around the same amount of image processing time – we arrived at this result.  As I said – not one of the best – but certainly the hardest earned 🙂

I have a couple of large deep-sky objects planned for the mini-WASP array that will make the Veil imaging marathon pale into insignificance by comparison, keep visiting the New Forest Observatory to see developments.  And to remind yourself of the power of the mini-WASP array, it would have imaged the whole of the Veil nebula in one go with its two Sky 90s and two M26C one-shot colour cameras.  And as the mini-WASP array also has filter wheels for each camera with H-alpha, H-beta, OIII and SII filters loaded – you can imagine what “the beast” will be turning out in the coming years.

This week’s object is not deep-sky, it’s our closest star – the Sun.  And look at the beauty of our nearest star as captured by Selsey astronomer Pete Lawrence.  What a truly remarkable image – I would have that blown up to A0 and it would be framed on the wall over the fireplace, I would never grow tired of looking at it.  Marvellous image Pete, and the details for capturing this superb image are provided by Pete below:

“This image of Sol was taken through a Solarscope SF70 double-stacked h-alpha filter set fitted to a Vixen FL-102S refractor. The camera used was a Lumenera SKYnyx 2-0M high frame-rate planetary camera. This is a 9-pane mosaic, each pane being distilled out of a collection of around 500 still images, processed in Registax. The 9 processed panes were then manually stitched together to produce as smooth a full disk image as possible and flattened. The main disk was selected and copied as a separate layer allowing me to process the surface and prominence regions separately. False colours were applied to the original monochrome captures using a levels adjustment. Then following a few contrast and levels tweaks, both layers were merged together to produce the end result.”

All that hard after-acquisition processing sure paid off with this one Pete – a truly lovely, and awe-inspiring image 🙂

The image for this week comes from fellow PAIG forumite Harry Page – with yet another superb deep-sky offering – this time it’s the beautiful Iris nebula with its surrounding brown dusty clouds.  This region of Cepheus is another one of my happy hunting grounds and I clearly remember grabbing some early Iris images with the original Hyperstar and the little H9C camera – they were nowhere near as good as this image of course 🙂

Harry provided the following data for his image.

1 Luminance 610 minutes

2 RGB 80 minutes each

3) IDAS light-pollution filter

4) 14″ Newtonian at F#3.75 with an Orion Optics corrector

5) Processed in Pixinsight and captured in AA5

6) All subs 10 minutes unguided ( new TDM on scope )

7) Camera Starlight Xpress H35

The Pixinsight processing included  DBE to remove gradients , histogram stretch , hdr wavelets ,  some noise reduction and finally a bit of a saturation boost.

You can see a higher resolution version of Harry’s Iris nebula image at the address below, I strongly recommend you take a look, the higher resolution makes a huge difference!

http://www.harrysastroshed.com/Image%20html/Iris2011.html