Celestial hemisphere:  Northern  ·  Constellation: Cygnus (Cyg)  ·  Contains:  NGC 6883
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The nebula around Wolf-Rayet 134 with Oiii emphasised, AstroBillUK
The nebula around Wolf-Rayet 134 with Oiii emphasised
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The nebula around Wolf-Rayet 134 with Oiii emphasised

Getting plate-solving status, please wait...
The nebula around Wolf-Rayet 134 with Oiii emphasised, AstroBillUK
The nebula around Wolf-Rayet 134 with Oiii emphasised
Powered byPixInsight

The nebula around Wolf-Rayet 134 with Oiii emphasised

Equipment

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Acquisition details

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Description

This is an updated version of my WR-134 project with a longer Oiii exposure. It is now an image comprising

1. An Oiii layer acquired with 16h of Oiii shot with an Altair 3nm narrowband filter in 180s exposures
2. An Ha layer acquired with 3h of Ha shot with an Altair 7nm narrowband filter in 180s exposures
3. A star layer acquired with 64 shots of 60s with an OSC camera. 

Layers 1 and 2 were shot with an Altair Hypercam 26M, layer 3 with a 26C. All on an APM 140mm f/7 refractor with the Riccardi 1.0x flattener, guided on an IOptron CEM70G mount. 

The approach here with the processing was to capture the main features of the Oiii nebula arising from WR-134, which have an approximately circular outline when captured with a long total exposure. The Oiii structure is often masked by the stronger surrounding Ha emissions, and itself has a high dynamic range so that often when imaged it appears to be around 1/3 of the circle, perhaps with the appearance of a leaping dolphin! 

To unmask the Oiii I shot for a long time (16h in total), and furthermore upweighted the Oiii compared to the Ha and the stars. This also reveals some interesting details of the surrounding nebulosity, including several strut-like features. Further details of the dynamics of the WR-134 region are on the web. 

The stacking and alignment of the data was done in Astro Pixel Processor, and the processing in Pixsinsight. In Pixinsight the strength of the 3 layers was rep-balanced to highlight the Oiii. The nebula layer is an HOO image in the RGB channels but with greater weighting on the blue over green. The dynamic range of each layer was also adjusted in Photoshop. Some limited noise reduction was done, and while some noise clearly remains the washing out of detail by going further was not felt to be helpful. This is a 4.8k by 3.6k crop from a 6k by 4k original with the variable WR star dead centre, then downsampled to 2k by 1.5k for this post. 

It was shot over ten nights from West Oxfordshire UK during July and August 2022. Shorter summer nights and British weather are responsible for that! It is my first big AP project with the APM 140.

Comments

Revisions

  • The nebula around Wolf-Rayet 134 with Oiii emphasised, AstroBillUK
    Original
  • Final
    The nebula around Wolf-Rayet 134 with Oiii emphasised, AstroBillUK
    B

B

Description: A revision where the star layer has been calibrated with SPCC in Pixinsight, the original full field is now shown, and other minor changes.

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The nebula around Wolf-Rayet 134 with Oiii emphasised, AstroBillUK