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The Owl Interrupted: 34 hours of SO only, Rick Veregin
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The Owl Interrupted: 34 hours of SO only

Revision title: Final

Getting plate-solving status, please wait...
The Owl Interrupted: 34 hours of SO only, Rick Veregin
Powered byPixInsight

The Owl Interrupted: 34 hours of SO only

Revision title: Final

Equipment

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Description

Why SO only?
  • For those who have not seen my other recent images, I had targets lined up for SO and HO, using my respective duo-band filters. However, in each case the SO took more exposure than I expected in my Bortle 8, and it was the worst winter for imaging skies ever. Thus, in each case I only captured SO data, then had to move on to other targets, higher in the sky.
  • Still, I hope you enjoy a different look in SO only, which has not been posted on AB previously.
  • And I am looking forward to doing the HO part for all of these images, next winter, which seems so far away...

The Owl
  • At 2,030 light years away, the Owl is 1.8 light years across, and one of the faintest Messier objects.
  • The Owl gets its name from the two dark ‘eyes”, no doubt popularized by William Parsons' ever so fanciful drawing. Not to take away from his artistry, but I’m happy to be in the “Astrophotography Era”

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  • While the Owl looks almost solid in images, it is a will-o'-wisp, a mere 100 particles per cubic centimetre. I had to laugh at this, the best high vacuums in our physics labs are something like 100,000 atoms per centimeter cube. I have to say, a vacuum has never looked so good!
  • The Owl’s formation started about 8,000 years ago, as a low mass star like our own sun, collapsing from its red giant phase (known to astronomers as the asymptotic giant branch) to ultimately become a white dwarf, violently expelled its outer envelope of gas.
  • Over thousands of years, that star has continued to eject mass in its solar winds. In total the star has now lost about half its original mass. The solar winds created the other two concentric rings, the innermost of which contains two jets of material, which contain dust that adsorbs light. The darker jet, or eye (at 2 o’clock), is close to coming directly towards us, the fainter one is moving nearly directly away from us.
  • The star is now a 16th magnitude white dwarf has about 0.7 solar masses and is between 40 and 150 times brighter than the Sun, running at a temperature of about 123,000 K.

My Processing
  • DSS: Calibration, registration and stacking
  • StarTools: Bin at 71% (1.41x1.41), background wipe, development, HDR, deconvolution, color, and background isolation.
  • Photoshop: Star removal with StarXterminator, APF-R multi-scale unsharp mask (as used by NASA), NoiseXterminator, adjustments (curves, levels, selective color, selective saturation), and stars added back in as a screen layer.

A test to see if anyone read this far
  • A bonus question, there is one small spot where SII is stronger than the dominant OIII, can you find it? And congratulations, you likely would have missed it without a clue. It does pay to read...

Comments

Revisions

  • The Owl Interrupted: 34 hours of SO only, Rick Veregin
    Original
  • Final
    The Owl Interrupted: 34 hours of SO only, Rick Veregin
    B

B

Title: Final

Description: Fixed stars--one needs to be careful in trusting star removal. Lesson learned.

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The Owl Interrupted: 34 hours of SO only, Rick Veregin

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