NGC 6543-Bruce Waddington: QSI 2020 Astrophotography Competition Winner! (SkyPi Remote Observatory)

Celestial hemisphere: Northern · Constellation: Draco (Dra) · Contains: Cat's Eye Nebula · IC 4677 · NGC 6543 · PK096+29.1

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NGC 6543-Bruce Waddington: QSI 2020 Astrophotography Competition Winner!

Link: https://skypionline.com

Powered byPixInsight

NGC 6543-Bruce Waddington: QSI 2020 Astrophotography Competition Winner!

Link: https://skypionline.com

Bruce Waddington began astro-imaging 15 years ago and has been using QSI Cameras since 2013. Bruce also spends plenty of time writing free software for astro-imaging including heavy involvement in the PHD2 open source telescope guiding software project.

The Cat’s Eye image was a major challenge for me and I started to think of it as “the target from hell.” The difficulty is the huge dynamic range of the object – the core has an apparent visual magnitude of 8 with a very high surface brightness, but the outer extensions are very faint. So I had to approach it almost as two separate targets. The core needed exposure times of 1-2 minutes to avoid saturation while the outer nebula extensions needed the 10-minute exposures I normally use for deep-sky targets. To make matters harder, it’s a summertime target in the northerm hemisphere which coincides with the annual monsoon season at my observing site in New Mexico. Consequently, I collected data during 9 nights spread across two years, 2019 and 2020. The final integration has 220 minutes of LRGB, Hydrogen-alpha, and Oxygen-3 for the core; and another 15 hours of LRGB for the outer nebula areas. Creating a composite image that looked natural and still retained all the structural and color detail was equally challenging, and I would estimate I spent another 20 hours doing that. Post-processing was done with CCDStack, PixInsight, and Photoshop CS5. All of the imaging was done from my installation at SkyPi Remote observatories in New Mexico using a Planewave 12.5” telescope and my QSI-640ws camera working at f/8.

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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	4203020
PixInsight job	SOQ6QL5GA7W75WS54IIM94C7WE6COXN5
PixInsight queue size	n/a
PixInsight stage	n/a

RA (center)	17h58m35s.870
RA (top/left)	17h59m47s.208
RA (top/right)	17h57m21s.120
RA (bottom/right)	17h57m23s.332
RA (bottom/left)	17h59m48s.370

Dec (center)	+66°37′43″.29
Dec (top/left)	+66°45′00″.55
Dec (top/right)	+66°44′50″.21
Dec (bottom/right)	+66°30′22″.78
Dec (bottom/left)	+66°30′33″.59

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NGC 6543-Bruce Waddington: QSI 2020 Astrophotography Competition Winner!

NGC 6543-Bruce Waddington: QSI 2020 Astrophotography Competition Winner!

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NGC 6543-Bruce Waddington: QSI 2020 Astrophotography Competition Winner!

NGC 6543-Bruce Waddington: QSI 2020 Astrophotography Competition Winner!

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