LDN1355 “Helping Hand Nebula” in LRGB

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LDN1355 Helping Hand Nebula in LRGB, 600 sec. subframes at -25C by Takahashi FSQ-106ED with CCD Proline FLI PL16083, from Spanish IC Astronomy Observatory, Telescopelive network.

After cosmetic correction of calibrated subframes I realized 2 LRGB integration by PixInSight: the first one by Process > ColorSpaces > LRGB combination, and the second, after integrating RGB masters, by Script > Utilities > LinLRGB operating over L master and RGB just created one.

I thus proceed with a normal post production workflow for each integration: LRGB, LinLRGB, RGB and L master: bg removal,  platesolving, Spectrophotometric color calibration, Starmask, Deconvolution manual made, with Bg-mask and PSF obtained by EZdeconvolution, first denoising by EZdenoise, Stretching, 1st Dark Structure Enhancing, Starless and Stars version for each one, 2nd Dark Structures Enhancing just to starless, Color Masking and curves transformation (starless), final denosing and sharpening by NoiseXTerminator and BlurXTerminator (still just starless), .TIFF saving.

I finally rebuilt stars + starless image in Photoshop, applying adjustements to starless and star as separated layers group, melted in Lighten blending mode.

As I wasn’t satisfied nor by LRGB,

neither by LinLRGB results,

expecially because of Luminance and contrast, I thus move for another Photoshop workflow, with RGB starless and RGB stars, respectively associated to L starless and L stars luminance layer group, in luminosity blending mode, with dedicated adjustements and opacities setting.

I found this final postproduction better ther previous results, and thus move to a crop version to better focusing about LDN1355.

Astrobin: https://www.astrobin.com/qb5b5g/D/

IC342 in LRGB, single night session

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Galaxy IC342 in LRGB, single session, 2 subframes for channel, 600sec, Officina Stellare ProRC 700 with Proline FLI PL16803 at BIN2, IC Astronomy Observatory of Spain, from Telescopelive network.

A very hard postproduction because of few signal and not so good quality of data, but I really stocked into this processing.

Astrobin:

NGC7023 LBN487 Iris Nebula in LRGB Takahashi FSQ-106EDX4

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LBN487 and NGC7023 in LRGB, Takahashi FSQ-106EDX4 and Proline CCD FLI PL16083, subframes of 300sec at -25C from IC Astronomical Observatory of Spain, Telescopelive network.

I developed 3 different postproduction: an LRGB one directly developed after LRGB master integration in PixInSight.

I thus proceed to an RGB version and a final LRGB version where L channel, devided in stars and starless masters, I integrated into RGB star and starless layers group in Photoshop with different values, with stars contributing at 10% and starless Luminance at 100%.

RGB integration

Luminance starless master

Photoshop RGB and separated Luminance master available here: https://e.pcloud.link/publink/show?code=XZ9CSDZm9yOwDzwaiH2lkIx0n2x90KYsRzV

Astrobin: https://www.astrobin.com/s6a8tk/D/

M33 (NGC598) Triangulum Galaxy in LRGB

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M33 from IC Spain Observatory, LRGB 600sec subframes recorded between 28/09/2021 and 16/01/2022 by Takahashi FSQ-106ED with Proline FLI PL16083 from Telescopelive network; astrobin https://www.astrobin.com/zkhypx/C/

Original widefield cropped twice

to better focusing about Galaxy.

M33 Galaxy lies among my best favourites targets and IMHO it is very difficult to be photographed.

Barnard 150 – Seahorse Nebula in LRGB

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Barnard 150 “Seahorse” nebula in LRGB, from Almeria (Spain) Takahashi FSQ-106EDX4 (106 mm) F3.6 with CCD Proline FLI PL16083; 600″ subframes.

Amazing wider field view includes many DSO objects.

Annotated wider field view shows PGC galaxies and details.

Starless stage of image post production before Photoshop reassebling reveals nebulosity complex details and structures.

After cosmetic correction of calibrated data, I processed subframes within star registration and integrated each channel. LRGB channel combination gave the starting point master. It was processed into dynamic BG removal and after platesolving colors were calibrated by SPCC.

Deconvolution and denoise followed to thus apply color masks for a first enhancement of colors and contrast first to the whole starry file, thus to starless and stars separated flows for better result.

Final composition of image made in Photoshop; original .psd with layers groups and adjustement here available.

M16 (NGC 6611) and the Pillars of Creation

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Astrobin:

M16 (NGC 6611) Eagle Nebula, or Star Queen Nebula, was discovered in 1745 by the Swiss astronome Jean-Philippe de Cheseaux while in 1745 and 1746, De Chéseaux compiled a list of 21 nebulous objects, of which he had originally discovered 8 objects: IC 4665, NGC 6633, M16, M25, M35 (this one might have seen before by John Bevis in England), M71, M4, and M17. Moreover, he independently re-discovered M6, NGC 6231 and M22 (No. 17). 

De Chéseaux sent this list to his grandfather, Reaumur, in Paris, and it was read by Reaumur at a meeting of the French Academy of Sciences on August 6, 1746 and mentioned by Jean Maraldi in 1746 (Maraldi 1751), by Le Gentil in 1759 (Le Gentil 1765), but then stayed unpublished and more or less forgotten until Guillaume Bigourdan recovered and published it within a larger paper in 1884 (Bigourdan 1892).

For Cheseaux observation cfr.: http://www.messier.seds.org/xtra/similar/deches.html [18/07/2023]

M16 was independently rediscovered, and nebula IC 4703 discovered, by Charles Messier on June 3, 1764.

This nebula lies in the Sagittarius Arm of the Milky Way and became famous as the “Pillars of Creation” imaged by the Hubble Space Telescope. 

The nebula contains several active star-forming gas and dust regions, and is part of a diffuse emission nebula H II region, which is catalogued as IC 4703. 

This region of active current star formation is about 5700 light-years distant. 

According to NASA, ESA, and The Hubble Heritage Team (STScI/AURA) [ https://esahubble.org/images/heic0506b/ ] among peculiarities there’s the 90 trillion kilometers long spire of gas that can be seen coming off the nebula in the northeastern part appearing like a winged fairy-tale creature poised on a pedestal, this object is actually a billowing tower of cold gas and dust rising from a stellar nursery called the Eagle Nebula. 

The name “Pillars of Creation” explains the gas and dust disposed in pillars clouds which are in the process of creating new stars, while also being eroded by the light from nearby stars that have recently formed, and it was given after the Hubble picture taken on April 1, 1995.

Astronomers responsible for the photo were Jeff Hester and Paul Scowen from Arizona State University. 

According to DeVorkin and Smith, 2015 [Devorkin, David H.; Smith, Robert W., 2015 “The Hubble Cosmos: 25 Years of New Vistas in Space.” National Geographic Society: 67 this name is based on a phrase used by Charles Spurgeon in his 1857 sermon “The Condescension of Christ”: by calling the Hubble’s spectacular image of the Eagle Nebula the Pillars of Creation, NASA scientists were tapping a rich symbolic tradition with centuries of meaning, bringing it into the modern age. 

As much as we associate pillars with the classical temples of Greece and Rome, the concept of the pillars of creation – the very foundations that hold up the world and all that is in it – reverberates significantly in the Christian tradition. When William Jennings Bryan published The World’s Famous Orations in 1906, he included an 1857 sermon by London pastor Charles Haddon Spurgeon titled “The Condescension of Christ”. In it, Spurgeon uses the phrase to convey not only the physical world but also the force that keeps it all together, emanating from the divine: “And now wonder, ye angels,” Spurgeon says of the birth of Christ, “the Infinite has become an infant; he, upon whose shoulders the universe doth hang, hangs at his mother’s breast; He who created all things, and bears up the pillars of creation, hath now become so weak, that He must be carried by a woman!”

According to Bally et. Al., the pillars are composed of cool molecular hydrogen and dust that are being eroded by photoevaporation from the ultraviolet light of relatively close and hot stars. The leftmost pillar is about four light years in length. The finger-like protrusions at the top of the clouds are larger than the Solar System, and are made visible by the shadows of evaporating gaseous globules (EGGs), which shield the gas behind them from intense UV flux.[10] EGGs are themselves incubators of new stars.

The stars then emerge from the EGGs, which then are evaporated.

Cfr.: Bally, J.; Morse, J.; Reipurth, B. (1996). “The Birth of Stars: Herbig-Haro Jets, Accretion and Proto-Planetary Disks”. In Benvenuti, Piero; Macchetto, F.D.; Schreier, Ethan J. (eds.). Science with the Hubble Space Telescope – II. Proceedings of a workshop held in Paris, France, December 4–8, 1995. Space Telescope Science Institute. https://ui.adsabs.harvard.edu/abs/1996swhs.conf..491B/abstract [18/07/2023]

M63 (NGC5055) Sunflower galaxy

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Spiral galaxy in the northern constellation of Canes Venatici belonging to M51 Group located to the southeast of the M101 Group and the NGC 5866 Group. The distances to these three groups are similar, thus the M51 Group, the M101 Group, and the NGC 5866 Group are actually considered as part of a large, loose, elongated structure; cfr.: https://arxiv.org/abs/astro-ph/9910501.

In the mid-19th century, Anglo-Irish astronomer Lord Rosse identified spiral structures within the galaxy, making this one of the first galaxies in which such structure was identified.

According to Ann, Ha et Al., 2015 [cfr.: https://arxiv.org/abs/1502.03545] catalogation of visual classified galaxies in local Universe the shape or morphology of this galaxy has a classification of SAbc where SA indicating a spiral form with no central bar feature, and bc describes a moderate to loosely wound arms, as evinced from a visible light observation with general lack of large-scale continuous spiral structure, thus M63 is considered a flocculent galaxy.

According to Thornley, 1996, when observed in the near infrared, a symmetric, two-arm structure is seen and each arm wraps 150° around the galaxy and extends out to 13,000 light-years (4,000 parsecs) from the nucleus; cfr. https://arxiv.org/abs/astro-ph/9607041.

According to Graham, 2008, the existence of a supermassive black hole (SMBH) at the nucleus is uncertain. If it’s true then its mass could be estimated as (8.5±1.9)×108 M☉, in few words around 850 million times the mass of our star the Sun; cfr.: https://arxiv.org/abs/0807.2549

Tully, Courtois and Sorce researches focused on galaxy distances measured M63 at 29.300.000 light years, alias 8.99 megaparsec. Cfr.: https://arxiv.org/abs/1605.01765

In this work I use bundle observation from Telescopelive Spain 2 CCD Officina Stellare 700mm RC.

First, by PixInSight, Cosmetic Correction was required to better recalibrate subframes, especially removing vertical couple of lines. Then the same registration, integration, bg removing, spcc, deconvolution and denoising routine to generate LRGB masterframe, while in parallel, working on Luminance master for final Photoshop image reconstruction, with starless and stars levels blending – respectively in luminosity (L) and screen (Stars) mode.

Astrobin:

Framelist available here:

C/2021 A1 Leonard

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C/2021 A1 Leonard 31/12/2021

Telescopelive: https://telescope.live/gallery/c2021-a1-leonard-0

Astrobin: https://www.astrobin.com/z7rxb0/

Astrometry: https://nova.astrometry.net/user_images/7582376#annotated

C/2021 A1 Leonard, annotations by PixInSight
White Balance values according to PixInSIght > Spectrophotometric Color Calibration

IC59

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IC59 from SPA-3-CCD Takahashi FSQ-106EDX4, IC Astronomy Observatory, Spain

Telescopelive: https://telescope.live/gallery/ic59-widefield-spa-3-ccd

Astrometry: https://nova.astrometry.net/user_images/7536891#annotated

Astrobin:

IC59 stars spikes by ProdigitalSOFTWARE &GT, Starspikes Pro
IC59 Starless integration by Starnet2, PixInSight

IC59 within SH2-185, Cassiopea.

Stunning SHO narrowband data from Spain Takahashi FSQ-106EDX4.

Final integration of starless (Starnet2) nebula color background plus stars from Ha integration as luminance.

Postproduction by PixInSight and Photoshop.