Australia chalk up another win in our Southern Hemisphere Astrophotography comptetion. Ali from Sydney won first place and A$368 in the 2024 edition!
The Betta fish nebula and the neighbouring unnamed SNR are fragments of a 14,000 year old supernova remnant G296.5+10 or ESO 217-25 only visible from the Southern hemisphere. This target was quite tricky to capture as it is very dim even in dark sky conditions. Taken on a Founder Optics 106 F6 triplet with these cameras: ZWO 2600mm Pro, ZWO EFW EAF, ZWO AM3. Captured over 27 hours across multiple nights with Ha and O3 filters. Processed as HOO image. Stacked and processed in Pixinsight.
The judges liked this image for its originality and rarity.
Second place, winning a £50 nPAE discount voucher, went to Carlos from Peru with The Great Eta Carinae Nebula. Taken with the following equipment: Newton 800/200 f.4 Telescope, Skywatcher Eq6R-Pro Mount, ZWO Asi 294mm pro camera, 7nm Ha, Oiii and Sii filters. Processed in PixInsight using Star Alignment, Crop, Gradient Correction, noise reduction, stretching, pixel math in SHO palette, histogram adjustment, convolution, contrast, saturation and star reduction and then post processing in Photoshop.
The judges liked this image for its quality of details and post processing quality.
The 3rd place position, winning the nPAE Gift Pack, is Kartik from the UK. He takes advantage of a vacation trip to Hamilton, New Zealand for some astrophotograhy to enter his Wide-field Carina Nebula taken with a Nikon D750 (astromodified), AF-S Nikkor 85mm f/1.8G lens. Untracked. 200 images of 10 seconds exposure each taken at f/2.2 and ISO 1600 taken. Digital processing methods employed were 200 images stacked in ASTAP and processed in Pixinsight. Final processing completed in Adobe Photoshop.
The judges liked this image for the inventiveness of combining vacations with astrophotography!
Ali is now entered into the nPAE World Champion vote later this month.
https://www.npae.net/2024-southern-hemsiphere-winners/
