AstroBinAstroBin
Celestial hemisphere:  Northern  ·  Constellation: Cygnus (Cyg)
Getting plate-solving status, please wait...
The Great Wall of Cygnus, Tom Gray
The Great Wall of Cygnus
Powered byPixInsight

The Great Wall of Cygnus

Getting plate-solving status, please wait...
The Great Wall of Cygnus, Tom Gray
The Great Wall of Cygnus
Powered byPixInsight

The Great Wall of Cygnus

Equipment

Loading...

Acquisition details

Loading...

Description

After taking some wide-field images of the nebulosity surrounding Cygnus, I decided to set out for the ‘great wall’, or more accurately a 20 LY long ridge - a dense star forming region in NGC 7000 (the N American nebula) lying ~1500 LY away [APOD].

With 1 hour of integration through my dual narrow band filter, I am pleased to have captured some detail of these ionised gases and the cooler dust lanes. There was a little high cloud, and 2 x 5 min subs lost to (inevitable) satellites, but I managed to stack and combine the remainder, albeit with some loss of quality. A rough polar alignment sufficed for 5 min subs with autoguiding (0.8” RMS).

Processed in Startools - really if you haven’t tried it you should - so easy to learn and use, intelligent algorithms, and plenty of latitude to tweak and play with the settings. Gradient wipe, contrast, HDR brightening, sharpening and deconvolution (defaults), followed by tame enhancement with the life module and noise equalisation. I had to re-centre some of the stars and applied a little healing to one or two dark pixel anomalies.

I also had a go capturing some RGB data, so will be interesting to see whether I can make anything of this. As ever, your comments, opinions and recommendations are very welcome.

Comments

Revisions

  • The Great Wall of Cygnus, Tom Gray
    Original
  • The Great Wall of Cygnus, Tom Gray
    B
  • Final
    The Great Wall of Cygnus, Tom Gray
    C

B

Description: The same processing but without application of the ‘life’ module, which brightens the image but tends to a little loss of resolution, particularly in the darker areas of the nebulosity. What do you think of this ‘life-less’ version?

Uploaded: ...

C

Description: My attempt at an LRGB synthesis using 64m Luminance from Ha/OIII filter 25m red, 5 min green and 5 min blue (as much as our fickle UK weather would allow). I had difficulty aligning these due to slight change in position of camera, focus and poor polar alignment. Aligned in Nebulosity using ‘translate, rotate and scale’ and then created a single LRGB FITS file for further processing in Startools. I achieved a better result doing this than trying to layer separate L and RGB files.

Uploaded: ...

Sky plot

Sky plot

Histogram

The Great Wall of Cygnus, Tom Gray

In these public groups

Schmidt-Cassegrain Telescope (SCT) Imagers
Altair Astro 183 M/C Hypercams
Optolong L-eNhance filter
UK Astro-Imaging
×

Warning!

This operation will reload the current page. If you have any unsaved information in a form, it will be lost.

You can also dismiss this window, and your operation will be applied at the next page navigation.