The Dark Doodad (John Dziuba)

The Dark Doodad

Technically catalogued as Sanqvist 149, the name Dark Doodad was coined by amateur astronomer Dennis DiCicco in 1986. The peculiar dark nebula lies in the constellation Musca, a relatively close 700 light years away. It spans roughly 30 light years across and from our perspective stretches three degrees across the sky, roughly the width of six full moons. The globular cluster NGC 4372 sits adjacent to the nebula in the field of view, but actually lies 19,000 light years behind it!

This was the first dark nebula that I can remember attracting my attention and I could not wait for the opportunity to image it myself. The FSQ106 is the ideal instrument in the ideal location in Chile. I was really happy with the quality of the data I collected, however the sheer volume of stars was overwhelming. PixInsight counted over 250,000 stars in the image!

One thing that helped, after the first processing attempt I went back and collected some 60 second RGB frames and I used those stars instead. I found the 600 second exposures were causing more saturated stars with slightly larger profiles.

I really struggled trying to decide to what degree I should suppress the stars, and I still don't know the answer as I type. Leave in too many, and it overwhelms the fine details in the image. Too few and it loses character. Also, there is so little actual background sky left after the stars are removed that I fear that removing too many stars yields an inaccurate depiction of the sky.

I left up a few versions with different levels of star suppresion, I would be curious to hear your opinions.

Thanks for stopping by.

CS JD

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Dark Nebula
ASI 6200 MM Pro
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Status	Advanced success
Started	...
Astrometry.net job	9445058
PixInsight job	EM4FUFUB93SV2QU8UICCV1V44BU2CULB
PixInsight queue size	n/a
PixInsight stage	TASK_LOG

RA (center)	12h29m22s.80
RA (top/left)	12h09m48s.38
RA (top/right)	12h03m25s.28
RA (bottom/right)	12h54m31s.18
RA (bottom/left)	12h49m36s.38

Dec (center)	-71°37′30″.6
Dec (top/left)	-69°08′07″.5
Dec (top/right)	-73°54′09″.6
Dec (bottom/right)	-73°56′56″.3
Dec (bottom/left)	-69°10′07″.7

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