Space Ghost

[Paul Haese]

Over the last couple of months between doing setup work for clients I have continued to collect data on various objects with the three scopes I have access to at Swan Reach Imaging.

This image is of NGC5367 or is it the Space Ghost. The "head" is known as CG12. Its an area of dust and gas with looks oddly like a huge comet or space ghost. It lies at a distance of around 2000 years from earth.

With significant colour integration subtle colours appear within and surrounding the nebulosity. Also of interest is the background galaxies.

Click here for the larger image.

For interest I have included a starless image of the object.

[Andy01 (Andy)]

That's a really nice, luminous image - it's almost diaphanous in appearance.
Love this gentle approach with the subtle glowing stars (the starless version is fascinating too).

Great stuff!

[Peter Ward]

Can't say I've seen this one before.
Nice to see a RGB palette too.
Simply excellent work that newbies would do well to model their efforts on.
Brilliant

[Ryderscope (Rodney)]

Space ghost is a good description of this one Paul. You’ve captured a good depth of detail in the dusty areas across the image. The AG12 is a good light bucket for this work

[Dave882 (David)]

Absolutely wonderful Paul! Those subtle details and colour hues through the ‘ghost’ is extraordinary, contrasted by those beautiful stars. Great work

[Retrograde (Pete)]

Very nice image of a faint object.

"Space ghost" - now that takes me back to a cartoon I used to watch as a kid:

[Nikolas (Nik)]

Love it!!!
but can it be imaged from the city or is this a real dark sky target?

[strongmanmike (Michael)]

A fine rendition of this dusty nebula Paul, nice composition and I like the wispiness of the dust, the subtle colour variation is a nice touch too, certainly a cool looking object. Like my opera singing, starless is little more than a party trick but hey, no harm in that but I do like the abstract floating in space look it has resulted in here

Mike

[Paul Haese]

Thanks guys for the comments. Like many I have a love hate relationship with starless images. It is quite interesting to look at objects such as these without the stars but essentially that type of image denies the very things that are helping to illuminate the objects. It can be rather hard to find a good balance between how the object is defined and how much impact the stars have on the scene.

Originally Posted by Nikolas

Love it!!!
but can it be imaged from the city or is this a real dark sky target?

I am not certain it would be an object you could image from the city. It would depend on which city and which side of the city you are located. Anything is worth having a go at though.

[Addos (Adam)]

excellent contrast balancing on this one Paul and great target. Great effort all around!

[petershah (Peter Shah)]

Oh that's a bit nice Paul