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 faint Oiii arc to the right of pencil nebula, which will probably require a ton more integration time to make sense of.
Next, there is this strange little nebula which I haven’t seen imaged before. While it’s definitely not a new discovery or anything cool like that, I don’t think it’s been imaged much because it’s so close to the much cooler pencil nebula. In the future, It would probably be super cool to image this a lot more deeply, especially because I would guess that there s a lot of IFN in this region.
This supernova shock wave plows through interstellar space at over 500,000 kilometers per hour. Near the middle and moving up in this sharply detailed color composite, thin, bright, braided filaments are actually long ripples in a cosmic sheet of glowing gas seen almost edge-on. Cataloged as NGC 2736, its elongated appearance suggests its popular name, the Pencil Nebula. The Pencil Nebula is about 5 light-years long and 800 light-years away, but represents only a small part of the Vela supernova remnant. The Vela remnant itself is around 100 light-years in diameter, the expanding debris cloud of a star that was seen to explode about 11,000 years ago. Initially, the shock wave was moving at millions of kilometers per hour but has slowed considerably, sweeping up surrounding interstellar material. In the featured narrow-band, wide field image, red and blue colors track, primarily, the characteristic glows of ionized hydrogen and oxygen atoms, respectively.
Image:
Full PNG available for download here: https://live.staticflickr.com/65535/53484996629_9392769012_o.png
Details:
Telescope: Takahashi FSQ-106ED
Camera: FLI PL16083
Filters: Astrodon Ha, Oiii
Location: Heaven's Mirror Observatory, Yass, NSW 2582, Australia
Date of Observations: 2021/12/1, 2021/12/15, 2021/12/24, 2021/12/26, 2022/01/13, 2022/01/15, 2022/01/20, 2022/01/22, 2022/02/11, 2022/02/12, 2022/02/14, 2022/02/17, 2022/03/11, 2022/03/21, 2024/04/03, 2024/04/10
Ha: 48 x 600s (8h)
OIII: 48 x 600s (8h)
Processing: Pixinsight
Credits: Data: Telescope Live; Processing: William OstlingProcessing:
Image Preparation
- Images were cosmetic corrected for hot pixels
- The subframes were weighted, registered, normalized, integrated, and drizzled in WBPP
- The Ha and Oiii channels were cropped platesolved
Linear Processing
- Ha and Oiii were deconvoluted
- Ha and Oiii were made starless with starnet 2
- Noise reduction was performed using deepsnr and an iterative MMT process
- Ha and Oiii were combined to HOO
- a synth RGB was created and the stars were extracted
Non-Linear Processing
- HOO was stretched using HT and exponential transform
- HDR was preformed using MMT
- Saturation and Color adjustments using curves
- Contrast adjustment with Curves and LHE
- RGB stars were stretched and added