Tag: astro photo

The Pencil Nebula in the Vela SNR – A Widefield Astrograph

This data from telescope live was pleasantly challenging to process! While the individual filaments hade high SNR, the background and fainter details were not, so figuring out a noise reduction technique that preserved the small detail but smoothed the background was a fun challenge. There are a couple of features in this image that I haven’t noticed before that I did my best to show off: First, there appear to be Oiii-Ha diffuse shock fronts above and below the actual pencil nebula. Additionally, there is a very […]

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The Heart Nebula in SHO

This was a really fun dataset from telescope live to process! I’ve never seen the wider structures to the right of the heart nebula, so I spent a lot of time trying to get it to show up. I also spent a ton of time working with color masks to give the diffuse gas a red color while keeping the sho pallette! Sprawling across almost 200 light-years, emission nebula IC 1805 is a mix of glowing interstellar gas and dark dust clouds. Derived from its Valentine’s-Day-approved shape, […]

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A 525 hour Cas A collab – Processing notes

Image: Image with Chandra X-ray: Details & Credits: :You can find all the details of acquisition and research done in the astrobin post here: https://www.astrobin.com/ug8i0t/ You can find a zoomable version of both images here: https://elveteek.ch/en/casa-dsc/OSH Processing: This was an especially tough image to work with because of the density of the starfield. Most images like this can be dealt with using tools such as starnet or multiscale techniques to separate stars from everything else. However, because the filamenary globs of gas from the snr looked too […]

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Fleming’s Triangular Wisp

In this stunning cosmic portrait, we are shown a celestial spectacle that showcases the scream of a dying star. The image is a tapestry woven by the filaments of glowing gas, a testament to the rich lives of stars and the beautiful remnants that they leave in their wake. Chaotic in appearance, these tangled filaments of shocked, glowing gas are spread across planet Earth’s sky toward the constellation of Cygnus as part of the Veil Nebula. The Veil Nebula itself is a large supernova remnant, an expanding […]

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 A Tapestry of Nebulae and first color image of the pulsar wind nebula around pulsar PSR B1951+32: Processing notes

Image: A few details & credits: You can view all the details and interesting features of the image on astrobin here: https://www.astrobin.com/zzoau6/ Processing workflow: The processing steps here are a result of an iterative processes where I determined the best methods for this dataset. Background flattening: DBE was used to remove the gradients from R, G, B, Ha, and Oiii. Due to flattener issue with the Oiii data, a circular gradient appeared after DBE. This was removed by creating a pseudo-large-scale-MSGR reference using clean Oiii data and […]

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NGC 40 and CTA 1 – a rarely imaged region

NGC40, also known as the bow tie nebula, is a planetary nebula (PN) in the constellation of Cepheus. It lies at a distance of roughly 3500 light years and spans 1.25 light years in diameter and is only 4500 years old. At the centre of the PN lies a white dwarf at 0.7 times the mass of the sun. The gases surrounding the white dwarf have a temperature of about 10.000°C and expand at 29 km/s. While NGC40 spans only some 1.23’x1.23’ the bigger structure that can be seen […]

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Processing the 255 hour M51 collaboration

Image: Full-quality image for free download here: https://live.staticflickr.com/65535/53102830146_dcf5e6941c_o.png You can view all the details and interesting features of the image on astrobin here: https://www.astrobin.com/7hwtz0/ For a great video on this collaboration, look here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zkES2ltGSoc For a zoomable image, look here: https://elveteek.ch/en/m51-dsc 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 7 times, and this was the best result. Background Flattening Multi-scale Gradient Removal was used to remove […]

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The Lagoon nebula in Broadband and Narrowband

The goal of these images is to show the different features of the Lagoon nebula in narrowband and broadband. This was some really clean data from telescope live, and so I was able to push the images pretty hard to show the structures off. The narrowband images are meant to show off the pure emission components, while the broadband image is meant to show off the reflection and absorption zones. Below you can see some comparisons of regions in broadband and narrowband. To separate these structures, on […]

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NGC 1097 and background galaxies

This was a tough image to process because of how faint the stellar streams are. Nonetheless, I think I did a pretty good job balancing out the brightness of the galaxy with the streams. I also am still fine-tuning my MMT HDR method, which works pretty well to bring out detail. There is a far better and deeper image taken by Mike Selby here: https://throughlightandtime.com/ngc_1097_lrgb_ha-rev-3_cdk_1000_2-may-2023/ Spiral galaxy NGC 1097 shines in southern skies, about 45 million light-years away in the heated constellation Fornax. Its blue spiral arms […]

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Reflection and emission in the eye of the seagull

This was a pretty fun image to process from the telescope live archives! Even though there wasn’t much data, with a lot of denoising I think most of the detail came through quite nicely. I’ve been honing a technique where I can process emission and reflection areas separately so that I can enhance reflection nebulae, and I think it turned out pretty well in this image! It isn’t by any means scientific, but it works to make pretty pictures. IC 2177 is a region of nebulosity that […]

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