The Tarantula Nebula - NGC 2070, 30 Doradus in its corner of the Large Magellanic Cloud (Niall MacNeill)

The Tarantula Nebula - NGC 2070, 30 Doradus in its corner of the Large Magellanic Cloud

My C14 Edge HD was set up wth the Hyperstar and the ZWO ASI 1600MC to image Comet C/2021 A1 Leonard, so I decided to do some wider field targets. My SBIG 16803 at Prime Focus has a 0.5 degree FOV. With the Hyperstar the ZWO ASI 1600MC, the FOV is 1.5 x 1.1 degrees. Given the rapidity with which the data can be acquired at f/1.9 I decide to do a 4 panel mosaic of the famous Tarantula Nebula and to better show its situation in the Large Magellanic Cloud (LMC). The final FOV is of the order of 3 degrees x 2 degrees.
I did a combination fo 10 sec and 30 sec exposures in case there was a need to perform an HDR process, but this turned out to be unnecessary and the bright central core of the nebula was not saturated at 30 sec. I therefore integrated the two sets of data to end up with a total integration time of 2 hours over the 4 panels. There were no reflections to deal with this time.
I imaged the Tarantula Nebula with my SBIG at Prime Focus last year, where the image scale was 0.47 arc secs per pixel. I wasn't all that happy with that image as the collimation wasn't perfect and there were differing colour fringes depending on which side of the meridian the data were collected. Nevertheless, it is interesting to compare the resolution achieved there with this image, where the image scale was 1.16 arc secs per pixel. This is shown in Revision B, with the SBIG image at right. Please bear in mind that the seeing may have been different for the two images. The SBIG image also has a greater red colour intensity.
Although there is no Ha data in this image, there are clearly large areas of Ha emission around the Tarantula, showing up in the red channel. The number of stars in the image is mind boggling and we are clearly able to resolve individual stars in our companion galaxy, the LMC.

Final
Original
B

B

Description: This shows a comparison of the resolution of images of the core of NGC 2070:
Left: at the Schmidt focus with the Hyperstar (f/1.9) with the ZWO ASI 1600MC (3.8 micron pixels), image scale 1.16 "/pxl
Right: at pRime Focus (f/11) with the SBIG 16803 (9 micron pixels), image scale 0.47 "/pxl

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