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Tuesday, March 16, 2010

Abell 21, the "Medusa nebula as a Stereo pair.




Parallel vision

Cross vision

NOTE! This is a personal vision about forms and shapes, based on some known facts and artistic impression. Viewing instructions can be found from a Right hand side menu.
Original Image with details can be found HERE
Much more stereo images can be found HERE
 
This stereo pair is a kind of "preview", since I have just started this project. I'll do the final version, when ever project is finalized.

Monday, March 15, 2010

Abell 21, Sh2-274, the "Medusa Nebula", Start of the new project.





 
The Medusa Nebula in Gemini is also known as Abell 21 and Sharpless 274. It's a large nebula as a planetary one, due that the surface brightness is very low, between 15.99 to 25.
Ones again, this target is very low for me, at highest elevation in South, it was about 35 degrees and after a three hours, the altitude was only a 25 degrees.
I managed to get only one 20min frame of O-III, binned 3x3,  but there was some signal, so I was able to make the "preview" image as a color one. (Red=H-a, Green=O-III and Blue=80%O-III + 20%H-a)

I'll continue with this target as soon as the weather cooperates againg.

Processing work flow:
Image acquisition, MaxiDL v5.07.
Stacked and calibrated in CCDStack.
Levels, curves and color combine in PS CS3.

Telescope, Meade LX200 GPS 12" @ f5
Camera, QHY9 Guiding, SXV-AO @ 10Hz
Image Scale, 0,75 arcseconds/pixel
Exposures H-alpha 8x1200s, binned 1x1, O-III 1x1200s, binned 3x3.

An experimental M101 Galaxy

Galaxy in "natural" color. Narrowband channels are mixed to match visible spectrum. Red=80% H-alpha+20% S-II, Green=O-III and Blue=80% O-III+20% H-alpha to compensate otherwise missing H-beta.
Galaxy in HST-palette, Red=S-II, Green=H-a and Blue=O-III

It's a Galaxy season but since my light pollution is so bad, I'm not able to do good broad band imaging, needed for targets like Glaxies.
I made this experiment to see, if it's possible to shoot Glaxy with NB-filters, there is some Broad band luminance used, it's shot with a Hutech light pollution filter.

Kind of interesting to see, how emission areas pop up visually, there was strongish signal in H-a and S-II,
O-III was weaker but there was couple of srong O-III regions, they are seen as Blue in a HST-palette image. There was some very weak O-III signal in a largish area around the Galaxy core, it can barely seen as a Bluish hue in the both images.

Processing work flow:
Image acquisition, MaxiDL v5.07.
Stacked and calibrated in CCDStack.
Deconvolution with a CCDSharp, 30 iterations.
Levels, curves and color combine in PS CS3.
Broadband data is mixed to a narrowband channels in PS.

Telescope, Meade LX200 GPS 12" @ f5
Camera, QHY9 Guiding, SXV-AO @ 10Hz
Image Scale, 0,75 arcseconds/pixel
Exposures,
H-alpha 10x1200s, binned 1x1
S-II 3x1200s binned 2x2
O-III 4x1200s binned 3x3
Luminance,
Hutec LP-filter 6x1200s

Plain narrowband images:

No broad band component, only H-a, S-II and O-III.
 Narrowband channels are mixed to match visible spectrum. Red=80% H-alpha+20% S-II, Green=O-III and Blue=80% O-III+20% H-alpha to compensate otherwise missing H-beta.

No broad band component, only H-a, S-II and O-III.
Galaxy in HST-palette, Red=S-II, Green=H-a and Blue=O-III

Sunday, March 14, 2010

Soul Nebula closeup as an animated 3D

In this blog, there is lots of experimental material. To see my actual astroimages, please, see my Portfolio: http://astroanarchy.zenfolio.com/
Animations are made by creating artificial parallax to an image. Then two images are animated together by using conversion web service, Start3D. There can be some artifacts in images, due the experimental nature of this work! The volumetric models are based on some known facts and an artistic impression.
Please, let the images load for few seconds to see them animated!
Original Image with details can be found HERE