Celestial hemisphere:  Southern  ·  Constellation: Vela (Vel)  ·  Contains:  HD74106  ·  HD74129  ·  HD74130  ·  HD74167  ·  HD74179  ·  HD74194  ·  HD74209  ·  HD74210  ·  HD74223  ·  HD74234  ·  HD74249  ·  HD74250  ·  HD74251  ·  HD74252  ·  HD74289  ·  HD74290  ·  HD74302  ·  HD74303  ·  HD74318  ·  HD74319  ·  HD74338  ·  HD74357  ·  HD74370  ·  HD74371  ·  HD74385  ·  HD74386  ·  HD74401  ·  HD74435  ·  HD74436  ·  HD74453  ·  And 335 more.
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Vela SNR - Gum Nebula Region, a Widefield, Gabriel R. Santos (grsotnas)
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Vela SNR - Gum Nebula Region, a Widefield

Getting plate-solving status, please wait...
Vela SNR - Gum Nebula Region, a Widefield, Gabriel R. Santos (grsotnas)
Powered byPixInsight

Vela SNR - Gum Nebula Region, a Widefield

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Description

This is a beautiful region lying in the heart of the southern constellation Vela, along the Milky Way's plane. The Supernova Remnant is extremely faint (much more than Veil Nebula), although much larger in apparent size. It didn't fit the entire ~5º field. All things old, I was happy to be able to discern fillaments of nebulosity, dark regions, (a bit of) H-alpha, and, most importantly, the Pencil Nebula, NGC 2736. This intriguing object lies about 815 light-years away. It is thought to be formed from part of the shock wave of the larger Vela Supernova Remnant.

Image taken simultaneously as my (incorrectly framed) 105mm image. That night was a real milestone in my astrophotographic journey: My first autoguided night. After ~2h fiddling with little tweaks both on hardware and on software, I did it! Used PHD2+ASI120MM+50mm Guidescope, and was able to get 4 minutes exposures at 200mm, with very little trailing! About 2" RMS error, far from perfect, but nice as my 1st results.

In this image, though, I had further problems with dew - forgot to turn on the dew heater, and, to top things off, after using a hair dryer to clear the dew, the lens focus ring was slightly moved, and I did not notice (sleepy...) until I saw the subs the next day. So, after all that, I got 5 extremely well taken frames, without trailing, dew and perfectly focused, 5 frames with condensation effects showing, and 11 frames slightly out of focus. This result is the sum of all this images in DSS, so my FWHM was far from good. No calibration as this is just a test to see how the 80min of data looked like, and it was surprising to me. Look forward to trying longer (this is insanely faint and difficult to bring out due to the dense starfield) and with better "frame quality control" soon, or maybe next season. The region is surrounded by red H-alpha nebulosity, which is mostly blocked by my DSLR. So, not the ideal setup for the task... The really dense starfield makes processing for this faint signal really, *really* hard. A mosaic with longer focal lenghts would yeld tighter and more controlled stars... 80min is barely enough data, and I should aim for at least 3h for better SNR. Hope you like my efforts given the conditions.

*Please check the full image 1800px - resized from original)*

Constructive criticism, comments and suggestions are more than welcome in the comments section. Thank's for taking your time to look at this image.

Taken from Rural Skies (Bortle 3-4; NELM ~6.2; SQM ~21.5*calculated), from Cristina, MG, Brazil (22ºS latitude).

Date and Time: April 1st, 2017, at 22h (UTC-3, start of capture)

Camera: Unmodded Canon T4i/650D, at ISO 800

Lens: Tamron 70-200mm f/2.8, operated at 200mm f/3.5

Mount: Sky-Watcher HEQ5, tracking, guided (!)

Guiding: Starguider 50mm Guidescope + ASI120mm + PHD2; ~2" RMS

Exposure Detail: 21x240s (total 84min)

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