A seriously faint (mag 18, surface brightness 24/sq arcmin) Wolf-Rayet nebula in Norma.
It is easy enough in H-alpha, in which at 5 hrs we see a pretty clam-shell structure. In OIII, it is very difficult to see anything at all against the billions of milky way stars, but after 10 hours, we see a much smaller ring-like structure. We were unable to convince ourselves that there was any meaningful SII, which would fit with it being a WR rather than and SNR.
Here we've mapped H-alpha (from 2015) to orange, and OIII (from the last several nights) to teal-blue.
There are so many stars, and so bright compared with the nebula, that it was unfruitful trying to do anything with the stars other than leave them as-is.
Quite faint WR but you’ve shown in nicely.
That’s the problem with faint targets and stars, they get dragged up and look messy compared to the brighter nebula.
That's a tough target and you made good use of those 20"s. I reckon I would need to do at least 30 hours of more with the Newtonian to come close to what you have here and maybe nearly 50 hours with the RC.
That object is so cool guys....wonderful structure bubble like
Thanks Louie. The OIII bubble looks a bit like an eyeball in cross section.
Quote:
Originally Posted by Paul Haese
That's a tough target and you made good use of those 20"s. I reckon I would need to do at least 30 hours of more with the Newtonian to come close to what you have here and maybe nearly 50 hours with the RC.
Thanks Paul. As well as aperture and time, what it perhaps really needs is an observatory somewhere very high and dry like the Atacama, so that the stars would be 40,000 unobtrusive pin-points instead of 40,000 great big blurry beacons blocking the view.