1001 Tales of Astrobin Nights: The Great Puppis Nebula (Brian Boyle)

1001 Tales of Astrobin Nights: The Great Puppis Nebula

Last week I celebrated 1001 days since joining Astrobin. To celebrate, I though I would attempt a new story befitting of Schehrarazade.

I love maps and early on in my AB story, I bought @Charles Bracken excellent Astrophotography Sky Atlas. Together with the excellent telescopius.com website, and ideas stimulated by my AB friends, these have formed the mainstay of my inspiration for my astrophotos. Early on, however, I did notice a bit of an inconsistency between the Sky Atlas and the DSS revealed through the telescopius site. The extended nebulosity in Puppis, one of the most prominent and large nebulas in our galaxy easily seen on the DSS, was not shown on Bracken's map. To be fair, it is also absent from the Pocket Sky Atlas too and contains few named objects - but many splendours.

A few of them are increasingly appearing on AB , including CG4 (aka The Hand of God, The Doomsday Machine) and "The Mountain", but the extent and surface brightness of the larger nebulosity makes it somewhat challenging to image. Over a year ago, I had my first attempt at taking a wider-field OSC shot with my NIkon 200mmm at f/2, but was disappointed with the result. However, my interest was rekindled by the recent amazing APOD mosaic of the Milky Way highlights the surrounding gas and dust, in which the "Great Puppis Nebula" was particularly prominent.

Armed with some of the amazing new post-processing tools (most notably those of RC Astro), I was encouraged to re-process my old Puppis wide field shot. After seeing how much I was able to improve it, I was further encouraged to attempt a 4-panel mosaic of the whole region.

155 300sec OSC images later and I have have completed my version of the Great Puppis Nebula. It needs a little more work - including drizzle processing - but given the speed of my computers, I suspect that will take another 1001 nights. For the moment I am happy with it, but I would really appreciate your comments.

I hope the shot helps display the richness of the area, CG4 is there (just below the centre) but there are a few other cometary globules there - including two to the North and West of CG4 - that look particularly impressive. I am now tempted to extend the mosaic by a further four panels to capture the Vela SNR, but I suspect that, at the scale, it will be dwarfed by the Great Puppis Nebula and I would have to extend the mosaic even further to pick up the Great Pyxis nebulae (Gum 12a and b).

Original
C
Final
D

D

Description: Revised with better? mosaic stitching

Uploaded: ...

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Status	Advanced success
Started	...
Astrometry.net job	7887515
PixInsight job	URMD9AB7TIB4EJ51R2385XHADPA13XN8
PixInsight queue size	n/a
PixInsight stage	TASK_LOG

RA (center)	07h31m10s.46
RA (top/left)	07h56m12s.73
RA (top/right)	07h01m57s.29
RA (bottom/right)	06h56m07s.42
RA (bottom/left)	08h11m11s.42

Dec (center)	-45°18′14″.1
Dec (top/left)	-35°44′50″.1
Dec (top/right)	-36°09′43″.6
Dec (bottom/right)	-54°23′18″.2
Dec (bottom/left)	-53°48′09″.6

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