Category: Astrophotograpy

A 3-panel mosaic of dust in the Chamaeleon region

This was one of the most difficult images that I’ve had the pleasure of processing, but I really think that the end result was worth all the trouble. Telescope live doesn’t really filter the data they publish, so most of the data I end up with is really hard to work with. This has an upside, though – I get a lot better at handling sub-optimal data! These datasets also weren’t meant to be a mosaic, so I had to do a lot of bludgeoning using photometric […]

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The Tarantula Nebula

The tarantula nebula is probably my favorite region in the night sky. The sheer expansive spread of the nebula, the complexity in the outstretched tendrils, the thousands of different colors, all come together form this incredible spread of gas and dust. This data from telescope live was incredibly deep despite the low integration time, as the sheer brightness of the region makes it really easy to image. The Tarantula Nebula, also known as 30 Doradus, is more than a thousand light-years in diameter, a giant star forming […]

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Processing an ultra deep 393h collaboration of M81/M82

Image: Gigapan link here: https://www.gigapan.com/gigapans/232382 I highly recommend zooming in on all of the smaller background galaxies! Image with HII This image has all HII data from the VLA added in blue-green, which highlights the extent of gravitational interactions. Gigapan link here: https://www.gigapan.com/gigapans/232383 You can view all the details and interesting features of the image here: https://www.astrobin.com/tb0sou/ Processing The processing steps here are a result of an iterative processes where I determined the best methods for this dataset. I processed the entire dataset a total of 12 […]

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NGC 6888: The Crescent Nebula

This is another image from telescope live: the Crescent Nebula. It was a tough dataset to stack, as there were a bunch of dead pixel lines from the CCD. However, once the dataset was stacked, it was quite fun to process. The Oiii data was extremally strong, and it was really interesting to see the extent of the wispiness around the nebula. I’ve been experimenting with a new “natural” pallete made from SHO emissions, and I think it turned out pretty accurate! NGC 6888, also known as […]

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Peering deep into the the core of M42

This is yet another image from telescope live. Although the total exposure time was a little over 45 minutes, the fact that Orion is so bright meant that the snr was still quite high. I’ve been iterating through versions of this image to figure out the best method of HDRing the core, and I feel like I’ve been settling on a pretty solid method using MMT. The detail in the core that I managed to pull out is really interesting to look at, so I highly recommend […]

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Stars and Globules in the Running Chicken Nebula

Here’s an SHO image from telescope live. This dataset had a pretty interesting quirk, which was that some of the given astronometric solutions from telescope live were formatted incorrectly, which broke WBPP and forced me to do some shady coding. Anyway, I’ve been working on a new method of SHO processing using MMT and GHS to even the midtones of each channel, which give the final image a lot more color. It also helps that this region has such a big diversity of gas emission. To some, […]

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The Glowing Hand of God (CG-4)

This is yet another telescope live image. The H-Alpha data really made this image come to life – it was actually a bit disappointing seeing how little dim dust the RGB image contained when comparing to other images. Regardless, seeing the depths of the hydrogen gas was really stunning. I’ve also been working on a new processing technique where I separate broadband and narrowband gas, which allows to to better control both levels. I think it works quite well! Can a gas cloud eat a galaxy? It’s […]

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The Spanish Dancer Galaxy

This is another image from telescope live, NGC 1566. This was a really tough image to stack, as there was a ton of uncalibrated dust motes in a lot of the frames, and there were a lot of dark artifacts on the brightest stars. Additionally, almost half of the frames had airplane trails that wouldn’t calibrate out. I ended up using the Adam Block method of selective rejection to try and remove a lot of the worst parts during stacking, and it seemed to work pretty well. […]

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Dust lanes in the Sculptor Galaxy

Here’s another image from telescope live: NGC 253. This was a really challenging but also really rewarding dataset to wrestle with. The biggest problem with the data was that half of it was at BIN2, which meant that registration introduced a lot of weird artifacts around the stars, and drizzle couldn’t really get rid of them. I had to pioneer a Multiscale approach to the stacking of the dataset, which got rid of most of the bad areas. The end result was totally worth it – the […]

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Reflection and emission in SH2-311: The skull and crossbones nebula

Yet another image from telescope live. This was a super fun dataset to work with – even though the total integration time was only 6h 40min, the data was very clean and easy to play with. I decided to experiment with a way to separate broadband reflection and H-alpha emission using continuum subtraction only from LRGB data. Even though this method isn’t very “scientific,” it does an extremely good job of letting me enhance different parts of the nebulae. I haven’t seen many LRGB images of this […]

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