This image is a result of 100 hours of acquisition by 6 different imagers. Our goal with this project was to highlight the faint Ha clouds on the foreground of this region, the faint halo of M31 and the IFN that connects to it, and the recently discovered Oiii arc that can be seen above the galaxy. We realized that these were ambitious goals given the low budget nature of our setups (a cheap DSLR lens, smaller sensor OSC camera, dualband filter and city skies did not help), which is why we chose to work together on this project.
Of the 100 hours that make up this image, 87 of them are dualband data collected with the Antlia ALT-P and Optolong l-eXtreme filters. The other 13 hours are broadband collected from dark skies in order to reveal M31's faint halo.
A lot of denoising was necessary to make the narrowband data presentable; as such the Oiii details lack significant small scale structure. However given our high light pollution and OSC cameras we were glad to resolve any detail at all.
The data was processed by Uri Darom.
Our Instagram: @awaimaging
The contributors to this image are as follows:
- Braxton Townsend @DaDillo (Insta: @da_dillo): 27 hours NB, 13 hours BB
- Ryder Cobean @Ryder Cobean (Insta: @ninotsmindeli): 34 hours NB
- Mikołaj Wadowski @Mikolaj Wadowski (Insta: @mikolaj__wadowski): 9 hours NB
- Jayton N.@BigJAstro (Insta: @bigjastro): 8 hours NB
- Jacob Newbould @Jacob Newbould (Insta: @jacobnewbould_99): 3 hours NB
- Uri Darom @MrSketchpad (Insta: @astro_sketchpad): 3 hours NB
We hope you like it.
If you're interested in contributing data to any future projects, please DM us!
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