M31

Almost a year ago was my M31 Globular clusters project. A fantastic project capturing a staggering 244 globular clusters associated with M31.

A year has passed and another M31 image is forthcoming. This time captured in HaRGB with my newish Mono camera, filter wheel and filters.

All of course captured with the ZWO ASI Air pro, a wonderful little device that has seen countless updated that include plan mode now. This allows an imaging run of multiple targets during a night. It allowed me on this occasion to run an imaging session on M31 swapping over filters and running the autofocus routine after each swap. It ran flawlessly.

So we have a basic stretch on each of the filters and a final combination giving a total of 4 hours, 1 hour on each filter.

Red

Green

Blue

Ha

4 hour Combination HaRGB

Crop

Overall I am very pleased with the image despite no calibration frames used at all here.

Waca Waca Waca Waca Waca Waca

Waca waca waca waca waca waca waca. Do you remember the sound of a Pacman? I bet you are doing it right now aren’t you… Well I have found the original, the progenitor of the classic 1980’s video game chomping power pills and chasing ghosts amongst the stars of the constellation Cassiopeia.




NGC281 or the aptly named Pacman Nebula is a bright emission nebula located 9200 light years away in the Perseus arm of our own Milky Way galaxy.
Discovered in 1883 it visually looks the same today as its discovery 138 years ago. However with modern technology and a dedicated Astro camera that can capture the faintest wavelengths of light invisible to the naked eye show you clouds of gas ten thousand degrees in temperature and walls of dust ( at Pacman's mouth) not being eaten but forming new stars.
My Blue & Gold Hued image is what we call a false colour image, using filters of the Hydrogen Alpha, Sulpur ii and Oxygen iii emission lines and mapped to RGB to create a colour image you see here.

Captured over several nights I have just shy of six hours worth of data. Tell you can see him right…..

LIke a bat outta hell

 Well Autumn is definitely upon us, the evening air currently is very high with moisture and this affects the seeing and affects the quality of our astro images. I am unsure if I am happy with my red filter. After an hour of RGB subs my reds showed a large red halo around the larger stars. Run the same series of images with the Ha filter and really tight stars. So the below image is a short run of 10 x 5 minute subs for Ha G&B captured with the ASI air pro and stacked in Deep Sky Stacker and finally processed in Photoshop. I also used an HA layer as a luminance filter. I am very happy with the image quality and depth the new camera produces.