I believe that everybody knows that I am a big supporter of backyard astro-photography. Still enjoying those wonderful images though that are taken with professional instruments far away from any light pollution. 2 years ago I downloaded (free) data from the Nordic Optical Telescope (big thanks to
@Niels V. Christensen who posted links to this site at that time). I chose M57 since I was just working on it with my own data. Once downloaded I quickly forgot about them since I had quite a backlog of my own data. Well, the backlog is gone now (2 years later, hence not too bad 😊) and I remembered that I still had those data laying around.
Some interesting numbers when comparing these data with my own sets:
Hard Disk Storage: <1/30th compared to my own
Acquisition Time: 0
Processing Time: <1/10th compared to when processing my own data.
We all see that Astrobin has lately a strong tendency to showcase the processing of professional data, and with today's tools the results are stunning, love them. On the other hand I just wonder in which direction the backyard astro-photographers here on Astrobin will go, hoping that the excitement/work/hardship/etc. of obtaining own data will always outweigh the processing of them.
Hence a huge shoutout to 2 very recently posted images of the same target:
https://www.astrobin.com/d41gsb/ by
@Roland Schliessushttps://www.astrobin.com/8o6moc/D/?nc=collection&nce=19343 by
@Bruce DonzantiBoth images are IMHO amazing. The outer shell of M57 was just a dream to get years ago with our instruments, and both show them so clearly, great stuff!
Here a link to the Northern Optical Telescope:
http://www.not.iac.es/The Nordic Optical Telescope (NOT) is a 2.56-m telescope located at the Spanish "Roque de los Muchachos" Observatory (ORM), La Palma, Canarias, Spain.
You will find a ton of data to process if you are interested.
* This image was not submitted for IOTD consideration
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