I attempted to image the homunculas @ eta carinae last night with my LPI and my 10" LX200R, with mixed results. I did manage to capture it but with alot of noise which I had to process out later. Looking at the photo though, it is quite apparent that it is a wonderful target for all the planetary imagers that we have on these forums. With the equipment and techniques that people on these forums are employing, I'm sure someone can come up with a great shot of this target!
Here is my attempt below. As a comparison, this is a pic by the 3.9 metre Anglo Australian telescope.
So, anyone up to the challenge for a bit of fun over the next few weeks?!
Thats still a good effort Paul. I loaded your pic into photoshop and pushed the curves as hard as I could and I could see the lobes alot clearer.
With my pic I kept the exposure time very short, like planetary imaging short, hence all the noise I had to work with in the end, and I couldn't see the lobes at all until I post processed it.
Hi all
Speaking of DSLR's heres my effort. Taken last year when testing out my modded 350D. 2x converter used to make a final F ratio of f11.2
10 inch f5.6 scope, no filters at all so IR light is also recorded.
some 8 second shots stacked, central star manually "dimmed" in Photoshop to bring out the nebula
Scott
Nick - it is approx 1/4 of the size of Jupiter - Jupiter is currently 45" in size while the homunculas is 18" x 10". It is a bright object though - so I think it is best suited for imagers like the Toucam etc. My pic was at a 2500mm focal length and it is fairly small there, but I think anything above ~2000mm focal length won't have any problem resolving it on a planetary imager (or any other imager with a small pixel size).
I think much longer focal lengths employing planetary imaging techniques is the way to go though.
Here is Eddie Trimachis incredible affort of the region from three years back with a C11 operating at 4800mm FL using lots of very short exposures (and some master processing):
Yes Eddies shot is about the best ive seen outside of a large observatory image, he was usinng an Adaptive Optics system (AO7) that consists of a rapidly moving mirror that can make fast corrections http://www.sbig.com/sbwhtmls/ccdacc....PTICS%20SYSTEM
I just wish someone made such a system that would accept DSLR cameras.
Nice image Mike - but I'd expect nothing less than that from you!
Thanks for the link to the image by Eddie Trimachis - it is definately the best amateur photo I have seen so far ***raises the bar to it's new position***
G'day Kal,
here's my efforts with the Gstar video.
- Imaged on 20070505
- 31.5cm Reflector at F/9 - GSTAR-EX set to 6x sense up and 25 frames per second.
- 125 video frames no filter - 125 video frames of each Red, Green and Blue filters
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