Astro Anarchy: The Giant Cosmic Squid in Mapped colors

Friday, November 30, 2018

The Giant Cosmic Squid in Mapped colors

I started this imaging project at this autumn season and after a several months I got it ready!
I have published a natural color version few days ago, the result can be seen HERE.

This is a dimmest target I have shot so far! (At end of the post, there is a single 20 min subframe od O-II light.) Total exposure time for the light from an ionized oxygen (O-III) alone was around 35h. Most of the data was shot at binned down to 4x4! For some details I shot about ten hours of 2x2 binned data. H-a is brighter but not bright either. There is about ten hours of H-alpha light exposed. There is very little light from an ionized sulfur, I shot bin 4x4 data about three hours for S-II. Total exposure time used is around 48h

The Celestron Edge 11" telescope with a 0.7 focal reducer has a perfect field of view for this object. This combo delivers a very high quality image from edge to edge. The Apogee U16 can be very challenging to have a good orthogonality and collimation due to very large CCD-shell.

Here is some optical analysis to see, https://astroanarchy.blogspot.com/2014/10/a-start-of-new-project-tulip-nebula.html

Ou4, the Giant Squid (Giant indeed, it's 50 light years across)

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Image is in mapped colours, from the emission of ionized elements, R=Sulphur, G=Hydrogen and B=Oxygen. The Squid Nebula is visible only at light of an ionized oxygen, O-III

Ou4 in light of an ionized oxygen only

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Also stars has been removed to show the actual formation better. Only the central star shines there.

Wider field of views, Ou4 inside the Sharpless 129

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The location in the sky as a relation to the IC 1396

NOTE, a relative size of the full Moon is shown as a white circle at lower right corner.

INFO

The giant Squid Nebula cataloged as Ou4. Nebula was discovered in 2011 by French astro-imager Nicolas Outters, the Squid Nebula's alluring bipolar shape is distinguished here by the telltale blue-green emission from doubly ionized oxygen atoms. The true distance and nature of the Squid Nebula have been difficult to determine. Still, a recent investigation suggests Ou4 really does lie within Sh2-129 some 2,300 light-years away. Consistent with that scenario, Ou4 would represent a spectacular outflow driven by HR8119, a triple system of hot, massive stars seen near the center of the nebula. The truly giant Squid Nebula would physically be nearly 50 light-years across.

A single 20 min. calibrated and stretched 4x4 binned O-III exposure

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Image is divided with a bias corrected flat frame and subtracted with master dark. Even after a heavy nonlinear stretching, very little can be seen in this single 20 min. 4x4 binned light frame.

Animation
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