[SkyViking (Rolf)]

Originally Posted by codemonkey

Holy ****...

LOL, cheers Lee

Originally Posted by rustigsmed

Fantastic write up and sublime work Rolf, grattis.
Will need to revisit this on my large monitor!

Ps also surprised you managed to nab 55 nights in 6 months!

Regards

Russ

Thanks very much Russ, yes the weather was pretty good here early in the year. As you can see from the bar chart I had a very good run in first half of Jan and another in Feb. Then as winter arrived there were fewer clear nights.

Originally Posted by Atmos

Can I just quickly say... I am in love with that telescope
What you have done is spectacular Rolf, I mean truly amazing. Just about to start zipping through the full res now but WOW

Thanks Colin, I think the telescope performs very well too. The Royce mirror is a joy.

Originally Posted by Nicola

An amazing job for an outstanding image, well done indeed!

Glad you liked it Nicola!

Originally Posted by rmuhlack

Inspiring, visionary work yet again Rolf. Surely this is the bleeding edge frontier of amateur astrophotography, internationally.

Thanks a lot Richard, I like to do these projects and try to reveal something new every now and then.

Originally Posted by Somnium

simply fantastic. amazing detail and it is extremely interesting seeing the difference in the Luminance integration time and its impact on the data. did you limit your imaging sessions to good seeing conditions or did you take cloud free nights when you got them ? this is the type of astrophotography that is simply inspiring. congratulations on your efforts, it was well worth the wait.

Thank you Aidan, I'm glad you liked the integration collage too. I included that to illustrate that it really does make a difference, also after 100+ hours.

Originally Posted by strongmanmike

Very cool Rolf.

This is one of those images that is not really full of spectacular looking colorful features like the Sagittarius Trio, Vela SNR or Orion regions and a casual passing look might even find it a bit boring...so it is not until you look carefully and realise what it is that you are actually seeing here that the enormity and achievement is realised. The write up is very useful to facilitate this too, very well done

I have considered imaging this cluster a few times in the past but considered it a bit lacking in interesting looking galaxies...but then I wasn't considering spending 6 months imaging it either so thank you for doing the hard yards (understatement) and producing a deep and intriguing vista

Mike

Thanks very much Mike, I'm glad that I could relieve you of the chore of imaging this cluster . I did have the same thoughts initially; that this cluster might not be particularly interesting, but that perception quickly changed as I got more data and began to research the limited literature on it.
Since publishing the image I have also had confirmation from scientists that the Intracluster Light seen here is indeed real and not previously described, so it was nice to get a confirmation of my own analysis and interpretation

Originally Posted by andyc

Comments and critique? I'm not sure I'm fit to critique your shoelaces... extraordinary image! And thanks for sharing the results of your massive project, and the interesting bits of research around features in the image - those dust clouds in front of the galaxy are very unusual.

Thank you Andy, I'm glad you found it interesting as I do like to provide some background and analysis along with my images.

Originally Posted by cometcatcher

So, this is the big project you have been working on. To say it's truly spectacular is an understatement!

Thanks Kevin!

Originally Posted by alpal

Hi Rolf,
I admire your work.
This has got to be an APOD.
The universe looks so large & interesting with deep pictures.
I would like to see the same entire picture in LRGB
but with say only 1 night equivalent of time - say 3 to 5 hours
just to get a comparison.
(I see you posted a single galaxy with many different total exposure luminance frames.)
I really think that what you're doing is the future of amateur astronomy if we want to do something of great scientific value.

cheers
Allan

Thank you very much Allan. While I primarily strive to produce an interesting and captivating image from an aesthetic point of view the scientific value (if any) is certainly on my mind when it comes to images like this one.
For example the Intracluster Light seems to not have been descibed in literature before (see my reply to Mike above)

Originally Posted by Shiraz

This is a wonderful effort Rolf. Thanks so much for posting your results and the very interesting and illuminating associated write-up .

Thanks a lot Ray. Speaking of illumination, it would be interesting to calculate the total (nano)Watt hours picked up by the CCD for this image!

Originally Posted by Slawomir

Awesome, unique, inspiring...think you Rolf for sharing the fruits of your hard work. I will need to read your write up again, slowly, and I will be enjoying coming back to your image to watch it, soak it in and to appreciate it.

Thanks for your kind words Slawomir, enjoy the image there is a lot going on in the background as well, distant galaxy clusters etc.

Originally Posted by troypiggo

Spending that amount of time gathering imaging data is one thing, and that's huge. But the amount of work you've put into the supplemental information and writeup - to a noob like me - that looks like a PhD submission! The combination of both is absolutely monumental. Hard to believe, but you've exceeded your previous attempts by a mile. I have no idea where you can go from here, but looking forward to it!

PS - I'm off to read more on intracluster light. I'm familiar with IFN etc, but not IcL.

PPS - I'm interested to know more about the data acquisition philosophy on such a huge amount of data on a night by night basis. You mention 4-5hrs data collected each night, but it's hard to tell from your graph whether you'd do all L in one night, all R in another night etc, or if you gather less subs of all LRGB in the same night?

Thank you Troy About data acquisition, I gave preference to luminance data whenever the Moon was not too bright and seeing was reasonable (Reasonable being somewhat arbitrary ). You can see the different bars on the graph jumping accordingly. For colour I took significantly more R than G/B because the faintest galaxies tend to be red and moonlight doesn't brighten the sky much in R, except for a few days right at full Moon. G and B data still had to be limited to moonless nights though.

Originally Posted by multiweb

Sublime picture Rolf. That's dedication. Excellent write up. Learnt a lot. Will have to come back and read and look again. That's a lot to take on.

Thanks very much Marc, glad you liked the write up too!

Originally Posted by Paul Haese

Huge body of work Rolf and I cannot help feeling that 60 hours of that time could have been put toward another project. Law of diminishing returns would be applicable here.

The medium image is superb looking with lots of things to view and inspect. It looks very well processed. Great colour saturation and very nice detail in all the major spirals and despite my above opinion massive amounts of signal acquired. Without doubt a reason why mega data collection is a good thing, despite some critics thinking signal acquisition is ok for some and not for others.

When I went and looked at the high res version one on your site whilst it was smooth it had the appearance of being smoothed in some way. Maybe this is not the case but that is how it looks on my monitor. Some of my longer galaxy projects give this appearance if I apply some smoothing to the background. The stars also look a little odd, but those are very minor things compared to the overall effect of the image.

I suspected this was the region you were imaging that night we had that discussion many months ago of what you were imaging next. I spent a bit of time looking around and thought in the end this must have been your target.

I don't agree that this is a boring area at all. The differing types of galaxies present and the super nova remnant make for a very interesting looking image and well worth imaging.

In my opinion a very nice looking with loads of detail and interest. Certainly close to one of your best and worthy APOD should you obtain that. You have now inspired me to add this to my imaging list. Well done Rolf.

Thanks for your kind feedback Paul. Re stars, yes in the corners there is a bit of distortion still which is a result of the Baader MPCC having very little tolerance as to collimation and tilt in order to produce perfect stars across the entire frame. This is something that has annoyed me more and more, and I've actually now replaced it with a Paracorr so watch this space
There is no smoothing as such applied, other than a bit of light noise reduction with a luminance mask. I did experiment with the sharpness of the stars though and found that their somewhat toned down appearance here is better suited for the presentation of the IcL and IFN structures which was something I really wanted to highlight with this image. Perhaps I'll revisit that in a future repro
As for the time spent, I don't think I could have brought out this level of deep detail with significantly less exposure time, as the integration progress collage shows. But of course diminishing returns do apply at some stage.