Celestial hemisphere:  Southern  ·  Constellation: Centaurus (Cen)  ·  Contains:  NGC 3882
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RCW 59 SNR in Centaurus, Foraxx Palette, Alastairmk
RCW 59 SNR in Centaurus, Foraxx Palette
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RCW 59 SNR in Centaurus, Foraxx Palette

Getting plate-solving status, please wait...
RCW 59 SNR in Centaurus, Foraxx Palette, Alastairmk
RCW 59 SNR in Centaurus, Foraxx Palette
Powered byPixInsight

RCW 59 SNR in Centaurus, Foraxx Palette

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Description

Thought for a long time to be a Ha emission nebula, RCW 59 is now generally considered to be a supernova remnant according to a 2008 paper analyzing a AAO/UKST Ha survey.  It's a large (100 arcmin diameter), omega shaped, and very dim object that seems rarely imaged.  The only amateur image I could find was by @Marcelo Muñoz  from Punta Arenas in Chile.

With a narrow sky window from the balcony, I needed an object to check my gear before attempting more remote sites.  Looking for an adventure after previously imaging the obvious targets at this time and location, out of foolishness I attempted RCW59.  The subframes looked awful, but you could just discern an interesting and very faint object buried in a dense star field.  Because this was something of an experiment, I didn't accumulate nearly enough subframes, so this must be considered work in progress.  The weather did not cooperate either, limiting the number of subs and I'm still not sure whether the blue halos around some bright stars are from clouds galactic or terrestial.  Being short of data and rather liking the ring-like effect (admittedly a matter of taste), I left them alone.

The image has a total integration of around 8.8 hours:
Ha 5x600s plus 14x720s 5nm filter
OIII 15x720s 3nm filter
SII 11x720s 3nm filter

ASI1600MM gain 139, cooled to -15C

Because I was short of data I kept more marginal subs than usual and had a struggle using PixelMath to combine the 600s subs which were framed differently to the 720Ha subs.  This is an image which would benefit from a larger camera sensor with greater dynamic range.

Even though light pollution is fairly low at the location (Bottle 3-4) the new Pixinsight GradientCorrection process was able to identify and screen out gradients when ABE didn't work and DBE was too difficult with such a faint image.  (Judging from their position, the gradients that GradCor found likely were from the airport, about 4 km away). With very faint OII and SII masters, but which still had a clear signal worth processing, I followed the example of Marcelo Muñoz and processed using the Foraxx script from Paul Hancock.  This requires each channel to be stretched first, which I did with GeneralizedHyperbolicStretch on the starless masters, which is great for bringing out faint detail.  For the stars, I did a simple HistogamTransformation of the combined SHO image using the Screen TransferFunction settings, and color calibrated them with SpectrophotometricColorCalibration before using StarX to extract them for later use.

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RCW 59 SNR in Centaurus, Foraxx Palette, Alastairmk

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