Hi Team,
With 'er indoors permission I ran away for a couple of clear nights imaging in the country under dark skies. Although the wind was a killer on the first night - even with the makeshift auto windbreak it was gusty and it was coming in from two different directions!
Anyway, two new targets (for me anyway) both need a second night's data to really pop & clean up the remaining noise, weather permitting, I should be able to get that done late this week.
(Descriptions below borrowed from APOD)
NGC 2736 - Hershel's Ray
The thin, bright, braided filaments are actually long ripples in a sheet of glowing gas seen almost edge on. The interstellar shock wave plows through space at over 500,000 kilometers per hour. Cataloged as NGC 2736, its elongated appearance suggests its popular name, the Pencil Nebula. The Pencil Nebula is about 5 light-years long and 800 light-years away, but represents only a small part of the Vela supernova remnant.
Taken from Suburban Melbourne & Rural Victoria -
HaO3RGB 180:120:40:40:40
NGC 2359 - Thor's Helmet
This helmet-shaped cosmic cloud with wing-like appendages is popularly called Thor's Helmet. Heroically sized even for a Norse god, Thor's Helmet spans about 30 light-years across. In fact, the helmet is more like an interstellar bubble, blown as a fast wind -- from the bright star near the center of the bubble's blue-hued region -- sweeps through a surrounding molecular cloud. This star, a Wolf-Rayet star, is a massive and extremely hot giant star thought to be in a brief, pre-supernova stage of evolution. Cataloged as NGC 2359, the emission nebula is located about 12,000 light-years away toward the constellation of the Big Dog (Canis Major). This image, made using broadband (RG&B) and narrowband (O3 & Ha) filters, shows the nebula's filamentary gas and dust structures. The blue color originates from strong emission from oxygen atoms in the nebula.
Taken in rural Victoria -
HaO3O3RGB 100:70:70:20:20:20
Both images taken using the 10" f4 CF Newt/Tak NJP/QSI683wsg8.
C&C welcome as always..
