Helix Nebula NGC7293 (matthew.maclean)

Helix Nebula NGC7293

Revision title: reduce brightness a little for some screens

This Helix Nebula was another little spare project from this fall. I had a little time one night waiting for Pleiades to become visible over my roof, so I pointed at NGC7293 just to try something. I typically tend to avoid south-facing (negative declination) targets because that is the direction of the city-center light dome and there are also some big trees that often get in the way. I was quite stunned by how bright the Helix nebula is - it was easily visible even on live view in SharpCap. I wish I had known this before because I would have spent some more time on it last fall. Unfortunately, this was basically the last clear imaging night I had in the fall, so I never got back to it to get any more data to help enhance the outer shell better. Still, it made a really nice image with only two hours of integration time.

I looked at a lot of the awarded images on Astrobin and it seems like many prefer to color NGC7293 with an orange/blue palette; I liked the look of that a lot, so I used some color masks and Curves Transformation to do so. Revision B is the pink/gray HOO coloring, which is basically how it came off the camera in this case (just a little color-boost needed).

Finally, even though the Helix Nebula is huge for a planetary nebula, it is relatively small for my short focal length, so I tried a 2X Drizzle integration. I do not usually have sufficient seeing for Drizzle to work well, but I think it was a net gain here since it helped resolve some of the cometary features a little bit better without too much added noise. I've uploaded the non-Drizzled integration too as Revision C just for comparison (I like Rev A a little better).

Original
B
C
Final
D

B

Title: HOO colored version

Uploaded: ...

C

Title: 1X (non-Drizzled version)

Uploaded: ...

D

Title: reduce brightness a little for some screens

Uploaded: ...

William Optics GT Series
Light Polluted skies
Northeast Imagers
Antlia ALP-T 5nm Dual Narrowband Filter

	Distinct awarded users	Total awarded images
Image of the day
Top picks
Top pick nominations

	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

	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

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	6892022
PixInsight job	3VO0OF842K8VAB61Q7K8740PTYJY4HC0
PixInsight queue size	n/a
PixInsight stage	TASK_LOG

RA (center)	22h29m42s.20
RA (top/left)	22h27m57s.17
RA (top/right)	22h27m53s.100
RA (bottom/right)	22h31m27s.99
RA (bottom/left)	22h31m29s.67

Dec (center)	-20°50′48″.2
Dec (top/left)	-20°19′37″.2
Dec (top/right)	-21°21′26″.0
Dec (bottom/right)	-21°21′55″.8
Dec (bottom/left)	-20°20′06″.2

Image Index:

Contribution Index (beta):