Two Tiny Tots: NGC 5189 and 3132

[astronobob (Bob)]

Originally Posted by Placidus

Thanks muchly, Bob. Focal length is 3454 mm.

Woah - think ill find some slightly bigger first

[Shiraz (Ray)]

very effective images of some small stuff - good going.

What is it with seeing lately - I had one night where it was pushing 5 arcsec at times. Nice and clear but useless.

[Paul Haese]

Originally Posted by Shiraz

very effective images of some small stuff - good going.

What is it with seeing lately - I had one night where it was pushing 5 arcsec at times. Nice and clear but useless.

I find I get back seeing at Clayton when the prevailing wind comes from the north west over the ranges towards me. Mostly this year I have found the seeing to be quite good though.

[Placidus (Mike and Trish)]

Originally Posted by Shiraz

very effective images of some small stuff - good going.

What is it with seeing lately - I had one night where it was pushing 5 arcsec at times. Nice and clear but useless.

Thanks, Ray.

The last clear night here, seeing was a glorious 1.5 sec arc but the moon was a day past full. We had a go at the Bug Nebula, but the faintest stuff was washed out by the moonlight, and the brightest bits were just burned out by too long an exposure. Such is life.

Originally Posted by Paul Haese

I find I get back seeing at Clayton when the prevailing wind comes from the north west over the ranges towards me. Mostly this year I have found the seeing to be quite good though.

We must try making a log of seeing versus wind direction.

[Ross G]

Great captures Mike & Trish.

Two very beautiful objects.

Ross.

[Placidus (Mike and Trish)]

Thanks, Ross!

Missed your reply in the excitement of having a new water tank installed. Room for eighty tonnes of water, and torrential rain expected.

[Placidus (Mike and Trish)]

Ooey-Gooey was a decon worm, with glistening beads that you could see ...

Two things came together to cause me to reprocess this. The first was the magnificent recent post by TopHeart, which made our previous processing look positively blurry. The second was having just taught GoodLook 64 how to deconvolve a starless image.

Here is the Musca Spiral Planetary (about 3.5 min arc tall) after 10 rounds of Richardson-Lucy deconvolution. (Both to avoid magenta halos and to avoid issues with panda eyes around bright stars, stars were removed prior to decon, then replaced using just the H-alpha channel mapped to white).

We were rather delighted to find that the OIII in the nebula, previously a blue blur, resolved itself into a series of six or so parallel interlocking spirals, with largely black in between. The pattern of lumps along these fine blue threads matches the largest and most obvious lumps in the far far sharper Hubble shot, so we think they're more or less real rather than glistening beaded decon worms.

... All along the railway track, his gizzards were a-splatter, but they didn't waste a bit of him, for now he's peanut butter.

[Atmos (Colin)]

Which one is Hubble?

Very nice MnT, the new one is certainly an improvement over the first, much sharper. I prefer the reds in topheart's shot but they're both brilliantly resolved!

[topheart]

Hi Mike and Trish,

I love your narrowband NGC5189!

Wow, how do you deconvolve with no stars?? Very snazzy.

I have taken narrowband data on NGC5189 that I haven't had time to look at yet.

Looking at your data, maybe there isn't much more extension of signal around the main body with Ha or O3??

Cheers,
Tim

[Placidus (Mike and Trish)]

Originally Posted by Atmos

Which one is Hubble?

Very nice MnT, the new one is certainly an improvement over the first, much sharper. I prefer the reds in topheart's shot but they're both brilliantly resolved!

Thanks muchly, Colin. I am thinking Tim's shot is LRGB so it will look very different colour-wise.

Originally Posted by topheart

Hi Mike and Trish,

I love your narrowband NGC5189!

Wow, how do you deconvolve with no stars?? Very snazzy ....

Hi, Tim,

Thank you!

We produce a starless version, then go back to the original version, measure the point spread function, and use that to deconvolve the starless version.

Originally Posted by topheart

.... I have taken narrowband data on NGC5189 that I haven't had time to look at yet.

Looking at your data, maybe there isn't much more extension of signal around the main body with Ha or O3??

Cheers,
Tim

Looking forward very much to seeing your NB version!

The Hubble shot doesn't seem to show much beyond what we captured - it's just a squillion squillion times sharper. But their field was tight and perhaps they were more interested in showing only the inner helical structure, which I understand to be due to precession of polar jets.

Shots from Alex W, Rolf Olsen, Geoff Smith, Don Goldman, SpiegelTeam, and Paul Haese seem to show much the same extension as yours and ours.

Very best,
Mike and Trish