Tarantula and its Web in 3nm NII

[avandonk]

It may be a tad over processed. Here 13MB

http://d1355990.i49.quadrahosting.co...70_NII_33f.jpg


The image shows detail I have never seen before. It is a total of nine hours of sixteen minute exposures.

Hopefully I can capture OIII and SII at the same depth and do a NB in Hubble Palette.

Bert

[nebulosity. (Jo)]

Have never seen anything like your LMC images, just awesome

Jo

[multiweb (Marc)]

Waves and waves of the stuff. Nicely done.

[gregbradley]

Nice work Bert.

Greg

[naskies (Dave)]

Nice work, Bert. I like all the swirling tendrils. Mosaic perhaps?

[MarkJ]

Fantastic shot Bert!

FWIW I don't think it is over processed.

The use of an NII filter is interesting. You mentioned you might get OIII and SII data as well but I suspect you could also collect Ha on its own with a 3nm filter and create you own palette with NII, Ha and ? Not sure if this would be appropriate to this object.

Mark

[el_draco (Rom)]

That's a view I've never seen before.... Serious detail. Excellent

[Shiraz (Ray)]

extraordinary image Bert. Your system is sensitive enough to display the context of familiar objects in a unique manner - it was clearly worth the pain of getting it going right.

[Larryp (Laurie)]

Never seen it like that before, Bert-fantastic image!

[DavidU (Dave)]

A stack of detail there Bert, awesome image.

[avandonk]

Thanks for all the comments. Yes it is difficult to know when something is over processed when detail never seen before pops out.

I am just very happy that the system is finally giving results beyond my expectations.


Here is a challenge for all you screen jockeys. Have a go yourselves to see what you can squeeze out of the data.

Here is a compressed fit of the 33 frame stack corrected only for darks and flats. It is x1.5 the native sensor size. 28MB


http://d1355990.i49.quadrahosting.co...1_NII_33f_.zip

Please put up your efforts. Don't be shy. We all may learn something.

Hint the 'noise' in the background are really stars just peeking up above the real noise. This real noise unfortunately is a product of the system not the Universe!

We can only get down to the real noise level when we can detect below the Quantum Noise (impossible) or the Heisenberg uncertainty principle. Meanwhile we settle for our very imperfect detectors and optical systems.


Bert

[LightningNZ (Cam)]

Edit - oops this is the 21 stack frame from yesterday repro'd. Now I'll have to try the 33 frame stack! - end edit.

The tiny 200KB limit really squeezes what you can show here, but here is my attempt at processing Bert's incredible NII image stack. I also supplied the negative which better shows the range in the bright areas. This little one is slightly clipped but the full size image is not clipped at all.

I used FITS Liberator with ArcSinH scaling to convert the FITS to TIFF. I think performed a Smart (Lens blur) Sharpen with Adobe CS5 (thanks to Louie's deconvolution tutorial http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-rsDRx73gWM).

I saved the resulting image and reopened with ImageJ and used its Contrast Enhancement feature which performs a normalised and equalising stretch to the histogram (0.000% of pixels saturated). This let me not clip the bright end of histogram.

Reopened again with PS5 and use the Astro Actions Local Contrast Enhancement to improve feature visibility.

I'm quite pleased with the natural look of the result. Please feel free to critique, and many thanks again to Bert for providing such amazing data.

Cheers,
Cam

[multiweb (Marc)]

Originally Posted by avandonk

Here is a challenge for all you screen jockeys. Have a go yourselves to see what you can squeeze out of the data.

Woohoo! Processing time.

[LightningNZ (Cam)]

Okay, same thing but with the 33 frames time. This data is just incredible compared to the 21 frames. It has a life and smoothness that leaps out at you as soon as you see it.

Again, I've done both the positive and negative versions. Possibly I haven't held back the top end as well as I should.

Hope people aren't minding me spamming the thread

Had a lot of fun playing with all this.

Cheers,
Cam

[strongmanmike (Michael)]

Amazing amount of gas in that shot Bert, no matter what the processing one would need to work on UK Schmidt plates to do much better I'd imagine

Mike

[marco (Marco Lorenzi)]

In one word: DEEEEP! Thanks for sharing

Clear skies
Marco

[TimberLand (Justin)]

I'm glad you gave it a name as it is very alien in the NII I would have never identified it orherwise. I'm no seasoned imager but still WOW.

Btw weather and technical faults I have never successfully imaged the Tarantula in RGB let alone narrow band. 16 min that is deep. Great gear well driven. Or should I say piloted.

Justin

[multiweb (Marc)]

Here's another rendition. Terrific data. Thanks for letting us play with it.
Big one here. [5.4MB]

[LightningNZ (Cam)]

Nice Marc. What software do you use?
-Cam

[multiweb (Marc)]

Originally Posted by LightningNZ

Nice Marc. What software do you use?
-Cam

CCD Stack for DPP and photoshop 5.