M27 Dumbbell Nebula (John R Carter, Sr.)

Celestial hemisphere: Northern · Constellation: Vulpecula (Vul) · Contains: Dumbbell Nebula · M 27 · NGC 6853 · PK060-03.1

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M27 Dumbbell Nebula

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M27 Dumbbell Nebula

This was an exercise in my patience.
I've been chasing an anomaly that is actually a design.
The Celestron 0.7x focal reducer for the C14 introduces distortion in the FOV such that unfocused stars are not round but appear to be flattened towards the side the faces the center of the FOV. No amount of collimation adjustment or changing the distance of the focal length to the camera makes any difference at all. But when the stars are well focused, you can't tell that there are any distortions in at the edges of the FOV. If the focal reducer is removed, or if the camera is relocated to work with the C14 HyperStar, then defocused stars are nice and round all over.

So after many changes in equipment setup, I have finally recreated all the flats and dark flats needed for this image.

I also tinkered a lot between using Affinity Photo and PixInsight to process the images. I don't know enough about either of them to get really good results, but the output of PI is much better than what I can get out of Affinity Photo.

At that, I have cropped the image enough to not show the really bad background gradient that I can't seem to eliminate. And I used Affinity Photo on the result to do a decent job of denoise that I never could do with PI.

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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.
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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	5280854
PixInsight job	MLBFC0J1BU43LZUWCQ7HNW0XMHOEALQO
PixInsight queue size	n/a
PixInsight stage	TASK_LOG

RA (center)	19h59m35s.770
RA (top/left)	19h59m12s.799
RA (top/right)	20h00m16s.185
RA (bottom/right)	19h59m58s.775
RA (bottom/left)	19h58m55s.275

Dec (center)	+22°43′27″.43
Dec (top/left)	+22°34′07″.40
Dec (top/right)	+22°38′09″.20
Dec (bottom/right)	+22°52′47″.31
Dec (bottom/left)	+22°48′44″.74

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M27 Dumbbell Nebula

M27 Dumbbell Nebula

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M27 Dumbbell Nebula

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