On the advice of the kind folks over at Astrobin, I have been learning about the fantastic tool BlurXterminator (BXT). It is an amazing AI tool that can sharpen up the stars and bring out details in nebulas and galaxies.
I used BXT on my M8 and M20 image (in the slideshow above), and I think the new version is stunning and really brings out the nebulae. It is my first published Astrobin image!
Now I want to go back and reprocess all my prior images …
This is M16 the Eagle Nebula from the constellation Serpens. It’s the home of the famous “Pillars of Creation” picture from the Hubble Space Telescope. If you zoom in … you can see the Pillars of Creation in this image. Pretty cool I could capture it with my small telescope with a little over 5 hours of data. Pretty amazing to think that these star forming regions are all around us … our galaxy is still under construction! And so, so beautiful.
M16 is an emission nebula of ionized hydrogen gas where star formation is taking place. It is 5700 light years away from us, has apparent dimensions of 70 x 50 arcmin, and has an apparent magnitude of 6.4. It’s a great target for a small telescope!
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Red and blue in the sky seems right for the 4th of July!
This is another image from the fabulous dark skies of Dell City, Texas. This is two nebulae – M8 Lagoon and M20 Trifid – from the constellation Sagittarius. M8 is an emission nebula of ionized hydrogen gas where star formation is taking place. It is 5200 light years away from us, has apparent dimensions of 90 x 40 arcmin, and has an apparent magnitude of 4.6. M20 is a combination of three types of nebulas: the red side is an emission nebula of ionized hydrogen gas where star formation is taking place, the blue side is a reflection nebula of a cloud of dust reflecting light from a nearby star, and the black lines are a dark nebula of an interstellar cloud dense enough to block the light from behind it. It is 4100 light years away from us, has an apparent dimension of 28 arcmin, and an apparent magnitude of 6.3.
Although they’re in the same direction from us, imagine living at the midpoint between them! They’d be much larger and brighter since they’d only be 550 light years away, but they’d be in opposite directions in the sky.
Given their size, brightness, and proximity to one another, this pair is a great target for a small telescope.
This image was generated from about 3.8 hours of data.
On my first round of processing, I messed up the color processing and switched colors, making everything look purple instead of red and blue. An interesting effect, even if “wrong”. Isn’t the universe beautiful?
Happy 4th of July!
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We recently went out to visit our favorite dark skies spot, Dell City, Texas, and we enjoyed 5.5 cloud-free nights and I collected over 30 hours of data. I spent most of that time on M101 and the supernova (arrow points to the supernova).
One of the things I’ve taken to doing is taking flats and dark flats before doing a meridian flip so each run is processed with its own calibration frames. That way if I bump the camera or reorient it, the flats will match the lights.
Now that I’m home, I’m processing the data. I didn’t use StarXterminator to separate the stars from the galaxy because I wanted the galaxy and the supernova to be processed the same way.
A couple of the light frames were thrown out by PixInsight, so this image ended up using 306 2-minute lights for a total of 10.2 hours of data. Compared to what I could get from my driveway, I think it was worth it!
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Space&Aliens 