South of the Equator

[dvj]

Greetings,

Back in 2005 I shot a 6 segment mosaic of the LMC in Ha light with my STL 11000M from Coonabarabran. Last night I completed a full re-shoot of the LMC in Ha light with the FLI Proline 16803 and FSQ from the same location, but this time with unlimited access the sky. A considerable amount of post processing was done on each of the individual nebulae shells to bring out the internal details.

The full resolution image can be found here.

http://www.gigapan.com/gigapans/143387

Be sure to use the full screen selection and press f11 to remove the borders.

Enjoy the ride!

Technical details:

Camera: FLI Proline 16803
Telescope: Takahashi FSQ 105 f/5
Filter: AstroDon 5nm Ha
Exposure. 9 segments, 22 exposures each segment of 40 minutes each
Location: Rainbow Observatory, Coonabarabran, NSW, Australia

[gregbradley]

Brilliant work John. That is amazing.

Thanks for posting that. A great reference image as well.

Greg.

[Larryp]

Lovely work, John!

[Ross G]

Absolutely amazing work John.


Thank you.

Ross.

[dvj]

Thank you gents. I've now started the OIII imaging run! I guess I like pain.

[multiweb]

Great project John. Pretty deep. :thumbsup: Looking forward to the Oiii. Are you gonna do a bi-color blend or go for Sii as well later on?

[dvj]

Oh why not. Sii as well. :lol:

[strongmanmike]

Pretty amazing John, reminds me of the contact print made from a UK Schmidt plate I found up at Mt Stromlo Observatory one night in the mid 80's while using the Oddie refractor (http://www.pbase.com/strongmanmike2002/image/110766126/original). I guess it would have been done on red sensitive plate, it looked just like your shot but in negative :thumbsup:

Mike

[Rex]

Awesome project Jon and a great result. Can't wait to see the finished product.

[dvj]

Thanks Mike,

The negative version is actually more appealing to me. Easier to see some of the very faint bridges between nebula clusters. I'll work on a negative annotated version and put it up on Gigapan. By annotated, there will be snapshots of individual features with designation with Ra and Dec. Great use of the Gigapan viewer. Click on a snapshot, it takes you to the object.

j

[strongmanmike]

You...see...very faint bridges?? :scared3:...eeek, me too :face:, only they look like jets :help: :P

[marco]

WOW John, you are producing some amazing multi panels mosaics lately, I have light collected for several "misarable" 2x2 panels and still very much behind the track on processing, getting everything seamlessly matching in these gigapixel image is very time consuming, kudos to you :thumbsup::thumbsup:

Ciao
Marco

[gregbradley]

I agree, Mosaics can be difficult. If you have time John it would be great if you could do a quick writeup of your mosaic processing workflow.

Greg.

[renormalised]

Nice shot :) Plenty of detail in that image!!! :)

[dvj]

Hey Marco,

Thanks. The MW mosaic will resume next spring. It will probably get up to 150 images before I'm completely board with the milky way entirely. Not quite sure how to put that many 32mb 16 bit images together yet.

2 other big projects are in the works with narrowband.

j

jg

[Shiraz]

very impressive John - work of art.