I started this project August 2nd and didn't finish until November 2nd. When I started, I really had no idea if I actually could finish, or even get close to finishing a project as massive as this. The goal: 50 hours Oiii, 50 hours Ha. I did a little over and a little under due to taking out some frames, but the grand total was 99 hours 30 minutes of narrowband data. LRGB added 5 hours on to that.
The last largest project I did was only 16 hours, so confidence was low at first. Then the data started getting better, my SNR improved every night. In fact, I was even starting to notice a few nebulae I had not seen in other images or professional surveys. I'll talk a bit about that later. A huge inspiration to this project was by Teagan Grable, who had made this brilliant image on Astrobin (
https://www.astrobin.com/21lufq/?q=m%2033&camera=). Although I wouldn't have gone looking if it weren't for my friend Benny and our conversation months ago about the Oiii abundance in M33 which convinced me to start this behemoth. I'm sure if I wasn't in a bortle 6 this would have been 100x better, but it was enough to start my own personal catalog (not official due to the nebulae being outside of our galaxy, and also the non-existence of an Extragalactic Nebula catalog) so, I started my own, unofficial catalog
. McCollum Extragalactic Unknowns (MEU) has 3 personally cataloged. MEU 1, 2, 3 are all in M33 and have not yet been identified or mentioned in any scientific paper. The thing is, all 3 are Oiii abundant and also have a strange relationship with Wolf-Rayet stars. Only 1 study has been done on the WR stars, yet they were only about the content of them within the galaxy, not the nebulae tied to these 3 in particular. Study can be found here:
https://iopscience.iop.org/article/10.1088/0004-637X/733/2/123308x600s Ha
289x600s Oiii
12x600s L
6x600s RGB
Total: 104 hours 30 minutes (The Acquisition dates are dated when I first took images through those filters)
MEU 1, the largest. Close to the size of NGC 604s cluster
MEU 2, brightest of all of them
MEU 3, by far the faintest and also the one that got me started looking for other potential WR caused nebulae.
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