Tarantula in SHO (Brian Boyle)

Tarantula in SHO

An unexpectedly clear night left took me by surprise and I didn't really know what to observe. I had put the RC8 on the observatory pier/mount, think the next clear night opportunity would be in dark of moon and I had my eye on the Grus quartet. But in 75% moon I was stuck with narrow band. I tried Sh2-69, but at an altitude of 20deg, the seeing was awful. It was a bit better when I tried the SMC, but the first few subs didn't add must to my previous image with the Esprit 100.

In desperation, I thought I would try the Tarantula nebula - 8hours before the meridian. The seeing was still poor, but I dialled in 12 x 600s subs in each of H, S and O and retired to bed - trusting that my initial focussing would last all night (benefits of a carbon fibre tube and a 2degree forecast variation in temps throughout the night) and that filters were indeed co-planar, and I didn't need to do a meridian flip.

In the morning I got up to find that I had lost four of the O frames to cloud at the end of the night, at that I had somehow managed to turn off the dithering and ended up doing a fair bit of cosmetic correction that the dithering would otherwise would have removed when stacking and sigma clipping.

The seeing isn't great, but otherwise I was surprised to see how well it turned out, given how little care and attention I had given to either planning or taking the data. Given time, I could probably come up with a better colour scheme, but life is too short to agonise over saturation, hue and contrast.

B

Description: One with less green, which may be more to the taste of the majority.

Uploaded: ...

C

Description: A technicolour Tarantula

Uploaded: ...

D

Description: A bit more contrast

Uploaded: ...

E

Description: Tweaked star reduction and stretch

Uploaded: ...

F

Title: 3 years later.....

Description: Re-processing with 3-years more experience and the host of new post-processing tools.

Uploaded: ...

New Zealand Astrophotography
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Status	Advanced success
Started	...
Astrometry.net job	5019819
PixInsight job	8XES5RECI4WUSBG8N71NMPH940AVHEG3
PixInsight queue size	n/a
PixInsight stage	n/a

RA (center)	05h38m30s.642
RA (top/left)	05h40m58s.574
RA (top/right)	05h31m59s.110
RA (bottom/right)	05h35m52s.797
RA (bottom/left)	05h45m20s.760

Dec (center)	-69°21′35″.94
Dec (top/left)	-68°37′43″.49
Dec (top/right)	-68°51′55″.15
Dec (bottom/right)	-70°05′19″.62
Dec (bottom/left)	-69°50′18″.63

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