Tag: telescopelive

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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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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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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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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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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Galaxy Triplet NGC 6769-71

This is another image from telescope live, of an interacting galaxy triplet plus some friends in the background. It was a really tough dataset to process – the data was badly undersampled and slighly out of focus. Very careful work with GHS and MMT helped a lot with this image, and I’m pretty happy with the amount of detail I got out considering the lack of data. Galaxy Triplet NGC 6769-71 is a gravitational interacting triplet of galaxies, located about 190 million light years away in the […]

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