The Homunculus Nebula using planetary imaging techniques
Hi folks - at the risk of duplicating other people's amazing efforts on the same target...this has actually been a project I've been working on for well over 12 months - probably spent 15-20 nights over this period just tinkering with different exposures, setups and processing techniques and after trying to walk the line between deep sky imaging and planetary lucky imaging, I realised that to get the best on this target it needed a full-on planetary approach...
So this week I've had 3 separate goes at the Homunculus, but it was last night that (after a terrible start due to heavy haze and currents from my urban jungle) the seeing settled down and suddenly we were in business.
The seeing was so good for a period of about an hour that I was actually refining my fine focus on the detail within the Homunculus lobes themselves (like what I do for planetary imaging). To keep the file size manageable it was a really tight ROI on the AVI. Here's the setup:
c14 at native focal length f11 (ASIAIR reporting 3985mm)
GSO craford focusser
asi462mc planetary camera
20ms AVI - 65,000 frames
ASICAP for capture
Stacked in AS!3 (best 75%)
Wavelet sharpening in Registax6 (only very slight sharpening required)
Additional boost to some levels and reduction of colour noise in Gimp / Light Room
Overall I'm really happy with how it's come out. I have a pic of a wider view that includes some of the flaring around the nebula itself taken with 30sec exposures and stacked in APP. My next task will be integrating these 2 together I think that will look nice if I can work it out.
Would appreciate comments/critique/suggestions. Thanks for looking
Probably only a handful or two, of deep sky objects up there that will allow this kind of approach and the Homo is a good example, well executed mate, you had the right equipment, looks pretty damn cool
Thanks folks I appreciate the comments! I should have mentioned the gain was set quite high at 400 to achieve shorter exposures and in hindsight I would try pushing further to reduce exposure sub durations further. The central star Eta Carinae is extremely bright and on my setup I had to be hitting exposures of under 5ms to tame it but that was losing detail in the lobes so a compromise I had to make.
And a quick note to those unfamiliar with planetary imaging- 65k frames is actually not too extraordinary in the scheme of things when doing high speed video (only 20ish mins). The luck is…which 20min you can use!! I did 4 captures on this night and all but one was rubbish.
Mike-hmm you’ve got me thinking what other targets would work… Trapezium, maybe a few other bright planetary nebula… any suggestions?
Lovely detail throughout the image David. Hi res images of this object that are really sharp and contain detail are pretty rare amongst the amateur community. Well done.
