Abell 31 (PK219+31.1) from Bortle 8 (Rajat Kumar)

Abell 31 (PK219+31.1) from Bortle 8

Revision title: V2 with additional data

Few months back, Astrobin had asked to do a self assessment of your AP skill level and I, without thinking, clicked on "Intermediate" from the options. To prove it to myself that I am "intermediate" and not the beginner I chose Sh2-231/232 to image and spent most of the clear nights in January imaging it. In the end, no matter what I did, I was never satisfied with the result. I got frustrated and because there was nothing I could do, I went to my profile and changed my "self-assessed" skill level to "Beginner". With this wounded ego, I wanted to image something difficult and challenging for my set-up from pristine Bortle 8 skies. A planetary nebula would be a great target but there are only handful which would fit in my short focal length of my doublet refractor in a meaningful way.

This PN has been imaged several times but mostly from dark skies and certainly always from a bigger scope and/ or from a mono camera. I lowered my expectations and just started collecting subs as and when I can. For this version, I had collected over 33 hours of data but at the end used only 26 hours worth subs collected over eight nights in the last one month. Just before starting I had also installed EAF on my scope which gave some confidence of producing more than a smudge. And if nothing decent comes out then I can just bury it to the graveyard of failed endeavours in my hard disk.

In the end, of course, it turned out to be lot more difficult than I anticipated. The 26 hour worth stack with my OSC and dual narrowband filter was very noisy. There are 10 different iteration of this image I did and this is the best I could extract from the data set. Going forward, I think I will add more data, add OSC stars to improve the image. But for now this is what I can get.

Also, my status of "Beginner" continues.

Original
B
Final
D

B

Title: V2 with additional data

Description: Out of 51 hours of data I stacked 43 hours worth subs. This is a cropped version. I have imaged this over 15 nights in the last two months.

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D

Description: Re-processed using Graxpert 3

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Status	Basic success
Started	...
Astrometry.net job	9480030
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Abell 31 (PK219+31.1) from Bortle 8

Revision title: V2 with additional data

Abell 31 (PK219+31.1) from Bortle 8

Revision title: V2 with additional data

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Abell 31 (PK219+31.1) from Bortle 8

Revision title: V2 with additional data

Abell 31 (PK219+31.1) from Bortle 8

Revision title: V2 with additional data

Equipment

Acquisition details

Description

Comments

Revisions

B

D

Sky plot

Histogram

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