IC 417 "The Spider" (SPICA) (Molly Wakeling)

Celestial hemisphere: Northern · Constellation: Auriga (Aur) · Contains: 24 Aur · 24 phi Aur · HD243680 · HD243840 · HD243871 · HD35556 · HD35619 · HD35633 · HD35742 · IC 417 · LBN 804 · LDN 1526 · Sh2-234 · The star φ Aur

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IC 417 "The Spider" (SPICA)

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IC 417 "The Spider" (SPICA)

Another shot from the SPICA telescope in Cyprus!

This is IC 417, know as the Spider portion of the larger Spider and the Fly Nebula. I guess it's because of the pincer-looking things? In any case, it's a cool nebula that I haven't actually imaged myself yet.

IC 417 is a combination of emission and reflection nebula -- in this wideband image, the red is from glowing hydrogen gas, and the blue is largely reflected starlight on the dust clouds. It lies about 10,000 lightyears away in the wintertime constellation Auriga; it's pretty close to the Flaming Star Nebula, actually.

This is, indeed, a wideband image, and I'm pleased with what I was able to pull out of the background. It's a 10" telescope at f/5.3, so the stars can blow out pretty easily, which can make pulling out that background nebulosity difficult. However, the Xterminator tools have totally changed the game -- I run StarXterminator before I stretch (since it works on linear data without an in-between stretch!) and stretch the stars separately from the nebulosity. StarXterminator is realllly good at catching the diffraction spikes too, even the big ones. Then after tweaking color and curves for both, I re-combine the star and starless images using the expression ~((~dso) * (~stars)) (where "dso" is the name of your starless image, and "stars" is the name of your stars image); I'd ordinarily just add the two, but this expression helps make the saturated stars look less severe. (The ~ means inversion.) Also, BlurXterminator and StarXterminator are absolutely killing it these days, saving me a *ton* of work on deconvolution, sharpening, and noise reduction. I know it can feel like hitting the "easy" button, but honestly they both do a better job than I can hope to do "by hand."

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Distribution of astrophotographers

This table shows the number of distinct astrophotographers who have been assigned and IOTD/TP award compared to the total number of images awarded.
	Distinct awarded users	Total awarded images
Image of the day
Top picks
Top pick nominations

Distribution of subject types

This table shows the distribution of awards per subject type, compared to the popularity of images of that subject type.
	Image of the day	Top pick	Top pick nominations	Total submitted
Deep sky
Solar system
Extremely wide field
Star trails
Northern lights
Noctilucent clouds
Landscape

Distribution of data sources

This table shows the distribution of awards per data source, compared to the popularity of images acquired from that data source.
	Image of the day	Top pick	Top pick nominations	Total submitted
Backyard
Traveller
Own remote observatory
Amateur hosting facility
Public amaeteur data
Professional, scientific grade data
Mix of multiple sources
Other
Unknown

The “AstroBin Image of the Day and Top Picks”, or IOTD/TP, is a long-running system to promote beautiful, interesting, peculiar, or otherwise amazing astrophotographs, with a focus on technical excellence. Learn more.

Submitted The date and time when you submitted this image for IOTD/TP consideration.	...
Views by Submitters (available since September 19th, 2023) Every image is assigned to 50% of available Submitters. In the event that at least 80% of them don't view the image before its time in the IOTD/TP process expires, it's assigned to the other 50% of Submitters and the process begins anew.
Promotions by Submitters When 3 distinct Submitters promote the image, it moves on to the next stage of the process: evaluation for Top Pick status. This requirement, in addition to anonymization of images and distribution to only a subset of them, prevents biases and ensures that the best images are selected.
Promotions by Reviewers When 3 distinct Reviewers promote the image, it moves on to the next stage of the process: evaluation for IOTD status.
Early dismissal Staff members have a lot of images to inspect on a daily basis, and they can dismiss images if they believe they don't meet the requirements for IOTD/TP selection. If an image is dismissed 5 times, it's removed from the process. This streamlines the process and ensures that any bias present in promotions could be overruled by other staff members.

Status	Advanced success
Started	...
Astrometry.net job	9411978
PixInsight job	NQA84W0SOYDX6X8MP3HZ0SFK9ZFV4KE0
PixInsight queue size	n/a
PixInsight stage	TASK_LOG

RA (center)	05h28m20s.972
RA (top/left)	05h27m07s.242
RA (top/right)	05h27m05s.370
RA (bottom/right)	05h29m34s.580
RA (bottom/left)	05h29m37s.269

Dec (center)	+34°25′21″.92
Dec (top/left)	+34°46′53″.71
Dec (top/right)	+34°04′08″.16
Dec (bottom/right)	+34°03′45″.29
Dec (bottom/left)	+34°46′32″.44

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IC 417 "The Spider" (SPICA)

IC 417 "The Spider" (SPICA)

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IC 417 "The Spider" (SPICA)

IC 417 "The Spider" (SPICA)

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