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Sunday, September 30, 2012

An electric Nike, IC 1340 in Eastern Veil Nebula




IC 1340, an electric Nike of Samothrace

IC 1340 in Eastern Veil Nebula. Image shows a starless version of pure ionized Oxygen, exp. time ~5h.

This is a second version of this photograph. It looks like an electric version of the Nike statue!


Statue of the Nike

Source, Wikipedia
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Winged_Victory_of_Samothrace


IC 1340



Whole image with technical details can be seen here::
http://www.astroanarchy.blogspot.fi/2012/09/ic-1340-project-as-bi-color-from.html






Saturday, September 29, 2012

Two panel mosaic from the Butterfly to Crescent Nebula




Butterfly and Crescent Nebulae in constellation Cygnus

Image is in mapped colors, from the emission of ionized elements, R=Sulfur, G=Hydrogen and B=Oxygen.
The colorful "noise" at background is not a noise but countless number of stars!

This is a part of the much large, 18-panels, mosaic of constellation Cygnus, it can be seen HERE.

Image is shot at Autumn 2011, I'm publishing this here, since I have reprocessed the color data.
Image is shot with Canon EF 200mm f1.8 optics, full open, QHY9 cooled astronomical camera and the Baader narrowband filter set. (H-a. O-III and S-II) Esposure times, about two hours per channel, total six hours. 

Shooting with f1.8 optics is kind of extreme, the critical focus zone is only 7 microns (7/1000mm).
Focusing and staying in focus is really difficult at that speed, one quarter of the degrees temperature drop is enough to destroy focus. I have build a temperature compensating automatic focusing system for camera lenses. ( http://astroanarchy.blogspot.fi/2008/09/new-equipmets-and-some-development-work.html )


A closeup image of the Crescent Nebula,
it can be seen at center of the image above

Image is in HST-palette, (HST=Hubble Space Telescope)
from the emission of ionized elements, R=Sulfur, G=Hydrogen and B=Oxygen.
Star colors are mixed from the NB channels, Red=H-a, G=O-III and B= 85%O-III + 15%H-a.

This image was selected as an APOD, Astronomy Image Of the Day, by the NASA.




Thursday, September 27, 2012

A scale study of the Veil Nebula supernova remnant




I have shot many targets with several focal lengths. Due to that, I will publish some of my material as image sets, with a different field of view and level of details. The fractal nature of our universe stands out nicely in this way and it will make the orientation more easy.

Many times, it's difficult to understand the image scale of astronomical images.
Therefore I have added a "Moon circle" in the images to show the angular scale in the sky. The full Moon has an angular size of ~30 arc minutes, that's equal to ~0,5 degrees.


A new scale study, the Veil Nebula


Note. The apparent size of the Moon is marked as a white circle for a scale.


Images used in this series:

Two images at top are shot with the Canon EF 200mm f1.8 camera lens and QHY9 astronomical camera with the narrowband filters: 

Images at middle are shot with SkyWatcher 80 ED telescope at  ~700mm focal length:
http://astroanarchy.blogspot.fi/2010/04/eastern-part-of-veil-nebula-as-stereo.html

Image at bottom is shot with Meade LX200 GPS 12" telescope at ~f5:
http://www.astroanarchy.blogspot.fi/2012/09/ic-1340-project-as-bi-color-from.html




Tuesday, September 25, 2012

IC 1340 project as a bi-color from hydrogen and oxygen



Last night I got the ionized Oxygen, O-III, imaged. It'll show as a blue color in this bi-color image. This color combination is very close to visible spectrum, so image is in natural colors. Now I feel very tired, I stayed up all night long and couldn't resist to process this now. I will shoot the emission of ionized Sulfur later for three band color image. Total exposure time for now is ~10 hours.




IC 1340, Part of the Eastern Veil Nebula in Cygnus
RA: 20h56m 45.8s DE:+31 degrees07' 17"



Bi-color closeup image of Eastern Veil Nebula, IC 1340.
Colors are mixed R=H-a, G=O-III and B=O-III + 5%H-a

IC 1340 is part of the Veil Nebula, a supernova remnant in constellation Cygnus at distance of about 1470 light years. This is one of the more luminous areas in this SNR. Image is B&W, since it shows only a light emitted by ionized Hydrogen. The shock front formed by the material ejected from giant explosion, the super nova, can be seen in this image.


An experimental starless version to show the actual nebula better




An animation to show difference between H-alpha and O-III emissions

Hydrogen and the Oxygen are clearly separated 


Orientation image

Area of interest is marked as a white rectangle in this older wide field image above.

Technical details:

Processing work flow:
Image acquisition, MaxiDL v5.07.
Stacked and calibrated in CCDStack2.
Levels, curves and color combine in PS CS3.

Optics, Meade LX200 GPS 12" @ f5
Camera, QHY9
Guiding, SXV-AO, an active optics unit, and Lodestar guide camera
Image Scale, ~0,8 arc-seconds/pixel
16 x 1200s exposures for H-alpha emission = 5h 20min.
12 x 1200s exposures for O-III, emission of ionized oxygen = 4h


IC 1340 in Eastern Veil Nebula. Image shows a starless version of pure ionized Oxygen, exp. time ~5h.
This is a second version of this photograph. It looks like an electric version of the Nike statue!

Ps.

I made an animation about different components in my image.

In this animation, allthe components in my image of IC 1340 are separated.

Looks odd but it's very useful while processing the image, since operations can be done to single element in image without interfering other image components.
NOTE. There is absolutely zero data lost in this technique due to my processing method.
I'm using a "difference mapping" between images and all the removed components gets placed back byte by byte in final image!