12 Dead Stars

[alexch]

Hi All,

As a part of my Swinburne Astronomy Online study I am doing an observational project on planetary nebulae. I managed to get 12 in one night last Friday at LMDSS (Heathcote, Victoria) with my 22" SDM and Sony NEX-5N modded camera.
They are all on one sheet (view at full size for maximum detail):
http://dl.dropbox.com/u/26867757/SAO/Cherney_PNs_201204.jpg

All images are cropped at 100%, everything is to scale and North is up. These PNs range in size from 0.8 to 12.8 arcmin.

All are stacks of 10 or 15 second exposures, some have less subs than others, hence more noise. Seeing varied with altitude so some images are worse than others, but it it should be okay for the purpose of morphological classification and basic analysis. It was great fun imaging and processing, now to the less exciting part of writing the text for the project.

Cheers,
Alex

[ballaratdragons]

Nice work Alex :thumbsup:

Yep, some of them are very familiar and have become regular friends :)

NGC 5189 is a bit of a favourite (Spiral Planetary Nebula aka Chinese Dragon)

[Phil Hart]

wow.. just casually punched out 12 images like that eh? that's remarkable. big aperture rules when you can make it work like that! :thumbsup:

Phil

[iceman]

Wow Alex! I'd been wondering what you were up to. Haven't seen anything for a while.

What a great set of shots!

[gregbradley]

Fantastic Alex.

12 images in a night - that's amazing.

That little Sony is a gem so is your scope.

Greg.

[multiweb]

Great collection of planetaries Alex. Beautiful colours and details. :thumbsup:

[strongmanmike]

Great collection Alex, a good way to present small PN's, they tend to be a bit small and a little boring on their own :thumbsup:

I looked through The Mellish 22" F5 at SPSP (thanks Scott) at a few things - boy what a scope.

Mike

[TrevorW]

Very nice Alex

[alexch]

Thanks for the comments!

I know these images are very far from perfect, some have excessive noise, trailing stars due to field rotation and seeing could have been better. However they do the job for the project and being able to image all of the PNs larger than 0.8' in the sky that night is great.

I imaged 18 objects, but some of them did not make te cut for being too faint or too low. I also did a quick supernova in M95 but didn't have time to process it yet.

A great bonus was a very strong zodiacal light (easily seen visually) on the eastern horison before sunrise (image attached, 114 degrees of the sky diagonally).

Cheers,
Alex