Faint emission nebulas in Tucana: NGC 456, 460, 465 and many others

[MLParkinson (Murray)]

Help!

This HOO image goes deep, perhaps far too deep for my heavily light polluted sky in suburban Sydney. I am confident of the reality of the brighter nebulas including the many tendrils, but I am not convinced about the reality of all the faint background H alpha nebulosity. Possibly, some of the structure in the surrounding nebulosity was conjured by small errors in the flat field light source, or more likely the impossibility of accurately correcting the complicated distribution of light pollution gradients accumulated when integrating over many long imaging runs.

Does anyone know of a very deep image of this field I could use as a reference? I would feel a little more comfortable with a reality check.

I can suppress the background nebulosity to help isolate the main nebulas if need be.

Technical Details:

Televue NP127is f/5.2 Refractor working at f/4.2, Astrodon 3-nm H alpha and OIII filters for the nebulosity and Astrodon RGB filters for the stars, QSI 683wsg Camera.

[petershah (Peter Shah)]

What a beautiful object......unfortunately I dont get to see this from my latitude.....lovely image

[Bassnut (Fred)]

This is my NGC456. But its over 100hrs taken in dark skies on a 10". Yours is remarkably deep given urban skies on a refractor!. Very good work indeed . You have extracted more than I would have thought possible given your site and scope .

[MLParkinson (Murray)]

Thanks Fred. I can see that your image is a beautiful one, even looking at the low resolution <200 kB version allowed under this forum. So I tracked down your SmugMug astrophotography collection. Wow! That is a fantastic portfolio. I am envious. I will study some of your images for inspiration on what I want to aim for. It is important to have direction and a plan when imaging at a high level.

The detail captured in the NGC 456 sections of our images is very similar. I was working at f/4.2 whereas you are working at f/9. That might explain why I can go deep at Sydney (I appreciate it is not that simple, we must also consider CCD pixel sizes, quantum efficiency, etc.).

[gregbradley]

That's a terrific image Murray.

I've often wondered about the TV 127is. Sounds like a wonderful scope and a more realistic "FSQ130".

Nice and deep and good colour.

Greg.

[peeb61 (Paul)]

Great capture Murray! There is not a lot of information surrounding this object available I have found as I am working on this as well...so far captured just under 3 hours of data....weather has been crap here on the south coast since the 25 Sept when I started....waiting for another opportunity to add more data...mine is more widefield....Yours? Gives me hope!!