Try increasing gamma if dark sections aren't distinguished

Try increasing gamma if dark sections aren't distinguished

Wednesday, October 7, 2015

planetary nebula Abell 72

Abell 72 is a faint planetary nebula
It's weak signal is almost all (teal/blue) OIII (doubly ionized oxygen)
the blue central star shows nicely in this image:
the other interesting structure in the field is the small faint galaxy pair just below the nebula.
at 979 million light years distant, the pair is quite far in the background.  it took 7 hours of exposure with a narrow band oxygen III filter to bring out the faint planetary nebula. an additional 9 hours of broad band exposure were required to bring out the faint galaxies.  interestingly, the nebula was barely detectable in the broad band image, showing the power of narrow band filters in light polluted skies.  


8" LX200R, SX-AO, astrodon 5nm OIII filter, chroma LPR filter, SX H9c/H9, ASA DDM 60
8/2014

luminance 56x5 min, RGB 14x20 min, OIII 22x20 min

No comments:

Post a Comment