The Angel (Jonathan Piques)

Celestial hemisphere: Southern · Constellation: Monoceros (Mon) · Contains: LBN 993 · LBN 994 · LBN 995 · LBN 998 · LBN 999 · NGC 2170 · NGC 2182 · VdB68 · VdB69

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The Angel

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The Angel

This is the Angel Nebula, NGC 2170, and it’s what I consider to be one of the most beautiful objects you can shoot in the night sky. It’s located in the constellation Monoceros (the unicorn) about 2,400 light years away, and is about 80 light years across.

I’ve wanted to shoot this for forever, and I’m really happy to finally have the skies to do it, because it’s very hard to capture: it’s very dim and doesn’t get very high over the horizon, so it takes a long time to get enough photons to actually make an image, and what data you do get is usually contaminated with light pollution and murky atmosphere down by the horizon. The weather out in New Mexico has been pretty bad recently, so it took me well over a month to get enough to make this, and it still could use more time.

From a processing perspective, honestly, I didn't really employ any nonstandard techniques here. Just gave the luminance data a good stretch to get the faint details resolved--I think I started with a partial masked stretch, and then took it all the way from there. I've often found that can get you some more faint detail though often at the expense of contrast. I used arcsinhstretch on the half-stretched RGB image to preserve as much color information as I could. Applied some very light HDRMT to the luminance, maybe a tiny bit of unsharp mask. I did have to do some de-noising too: this data was really noisy, despite the integration time and the ridiculously dark skies in New Mexico. From there it was just curves adjustments to taste.

Anyway! Hope I did this a small measure of justice. All commentary & criticisms welcome.

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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	5369620
PixInsight job	FM7B6F4QWMRFQJYH98XXP0I8QJ8B1QHG
PixInsight queue size	n/a
PixInsight stage	TASK_LOG

RA (center)	06h08m10s.827
RA (top/left)	06h09m53s.610
RA (top/right)	06h06m40s.571
RA (bottom/right)	06h06m28s.515
RA (bottom/left)	06h09m41s.190

Dec (center)	-06°24′23″.73
Dec (top/left)	-06°06′28″.46
Dec (top/right)	-06°02′51″.85
Dec (bottom/right)	-06°42′17″.41
Dec (bottom/left)	-06°45′52″.00

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