Ant Nebula ( Mz 3) – A Small Thing in a Small Telescope (Alex Woronow)

Celestial hemisphere: Southern · Constellation: Norma (Nor) · Contains: NGC 6067 · NGC 6152 · Part of the constellation Norma (Nor) · The star γ1 Nor · The star γ2 Nor · The star κ Nor

Ant Nebula ( Mz 3) – A Small Thing in a Small Telescope, Alex Woronow

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Ant Nebula ( Mz 3) – A Small Thing in a Small Telescope

Powered byPixInsight

Ant Nebula ( Mz 3) – A Small Thing in a Small Telescope

Ant Nebula ( Mz 3) – A Small Thing in a Small Telescope

OTA: FSQ106 (with 0.73 reducer)
Camera: FLI PL16083 (CCD)
Observatory: Telescope Live (AUS-2 CCD)
Date of Capture: Oct '21
Date of Processing: Mar '23

Exposures Used:
H: 34 x 900 sec
O: 31 x   "
S: 34 x   "
Total Exposure time: 24.7 hours
Image Width: 5.4 arc-minutes

Processing Tools:
1.   Commercial: PixInsight, Topaz
2.   Pixinsight Addons: NoiseXTerminator, BlurXTerminator
3.   My Scripts: NB_Assistant, AC_Restar, Subframe Weighting Tool (Excel w/ J. Hunt)

Target Description:
Totally misnamed. An ant, like all insects, has three body segments. This is a bipolar nebula having two segments. So ignore the title above, and let's call it by its scientific name, "Mz 3."

Capture Issues:
So you have a target of about 50 arc seconds in its longest axis (by 12 arc seconds); what imaging rig would you use? How about a 4" refractor with a reducer and 9 micron pixels in a noisy CCD camera? That's a 5.4 degree fov and a Nyquist resolution of about 15 arc seconds, making this a 1x3 Nyquist-units object.

Processing Description:
As mentioned above, this is anything but an ideal rig for this target…making the processing one giant challenge! So….
I used a 2x drizzle and every image sharpening tool that could contribute to making this bipolar nebula look bipolar. Amazingly, there it is in the widefield image, with just a bit of revealed structure in the zoomed view insert.

Target Statistics:
Distance: 8000 ly
Apparent Magnitude: 13.8
Absolute Magnitude: 1.8
Pixel Span at Target: 8.8E10

Alex Woronow

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Title: Annotated

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Status	Advanced failed
Started	...
Astrometry.net job	9409322
PixInsight job	2MR8KDMPDBF00KGIO5UFPHIUY4SEVP3M
PixInsight queue size	n/a
PixInsight stage	PLATE_SOLVING_IMAGE

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Ant Nebula ( Mz 3) – A Small Thing in a Small Telescope

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Ant Nebula ( Mz 3) – A Small Thing in a Small Telescope

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