M1 - "Smoked Crab Nebula"

[Paramount]

Hi
Ok, I haven't renamed this popular object. One of our next door neighbours had been clearing out bags of rubbish from their house and decided to have a bonfire in their back garden earlier in the day (not sure if there is some council regulation against that), anyway they lefty the fire to burn away and it was still bellowing out smoke all night and into the following day. On a lot of occasions the clouds of smoke blew right through my view of the sky (inconsiderate people). I managed to get 6x20 minutes each for Ha, OIII and SII before a tree called an end to this image. It was taken with a Takahashi FSQ106ED and Starlight Xpress SXVF H9 on a Paramount ME using a lodestar and OAG for guiding. I mapped the results to the HST palette and as there was good signal for each emission line nothing was done with the weighting or shifting the colour balance. I have tried this subject several times with different set ups and they can be seen in the image galery of my website http://www.imagingtheheavens.co.uk
A full size high resolution of this image can be seen at th following link http://www.pbase.com/imaging_the_hea...07894/original
I did check the optics of the FSQ after I finished to see if there were any contaminants on them but they were clear otherwise my neighbours would be receiving a bill for damage
Thanks for looking
Best wishes
Gordon

[TrevorW]

Technicolour rainbow

the smoke haze played havoc

[bkm2304 (Richard Brown)]

Hey Gordon,

Looks great and you may have discovered a new pallette - NDNS -Next Door Neighbour's Smoke!

We are on a farm north of Newcastle (upon Hunter not Tyne!) which has national park all around us and have had a week of 38-43 degrees C days with more to come which usually spells B.U.S.H.F.I.R.E. PALLETE - a kind of red - orange smear across everything. My mirror was 39 deg C yesterday evening after sunset - oh great! All this heat and floods and cyclone to the north west and south.

Richard

[Craig_L]

Hi Gordon,

For what it is worth, I had a go at M1 with the lightbuckets scope in SII Ha OIII and got similar colours. And I think the New Mexico skies were pretty clear of smoke. All three filters gave nice images. I also did an RGB version which was fine. Gave up trying to process the NB images.

[CoolhandJo (Paul)]

Very nice image

[gregbradley]

That looks fabulous. Its similar to when its imaged with a polarising filter.

Greg.