I thought it would be fun to create a video of the Jellyfish Nebula and try out the new video feature on AstroBin. Here's the original image for the more traditional experience:
https://www.dropbox.com/scl/fi/39wrg3rvgf3e7jwuiiowr/IC443_HaRGB_2023-11-04.png?rlkey=qgrs5jdyn0j3rfpopsuzg823p&dl=0The
Jellyfish Nebula, or IC 443, is the remains of a star that went supernova somewhere between 3,000 and 30,000 years ago, which is very recent at cosmic time-scales. It is located in the constellation of Gemini, approximately 5,000 years from the Earth. It covers an apparent diameter of almost double that of the full moon in the night sky, and is estimated to have a physical size of 70 light years across.
The final image is the result of a tedious 16.5 hours worth of individual sub-frames in H-alpha, R, G and B over 6 nights of capture, spread across almost two weeks,
and discarding dozens of subs due to moonlight and/or clouds affecting the quality of them. The Dreamscope 16” Newtonian Astrograph that I am renting from the deserts of Utah was used to capture this target. Processing required carefully balancing the blue and green channels that were washed out by moonlight with the other channels and using H-alpha to both seed the other channels and act as a luminance channel.
And finally the video itself uses a starless version of the H-alpha data as a depth map to create the 3D volumetric effects of the nebular structures seen at the start. The audio track, “Cosmic Blunt”, is courtesy of Dylan Sitts and Jobii through Epidemic Sound.
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