Since April 2026 the IAS 10″ remote telescope “Lukas” features a piggybacked Epsilon-130 with an ASI2600MC one-shot-color camera, with a way wider field of view than the main telescope. Ideal for comets und overview images.
The first test target was – of course, under southern skies – the vast expanse of the Carina Nebula, just a bit more than two hours of exposure time.
Many thanks to Thomas Klemmer for providing the scope and the camera.
NGC 3660, SN 2026cff, and PGC 1000714 – Galaxies and Supernova in Crater – OSC v1
A second attempt at NGC 3660 and friends, previously imaged here, with the longer focal length of the Cassegrain (4500 mm) at the IAS Hakos Observatory, Namibia.
PGC 49877 / Fr 2-8 – Galaxy / Planetary Nebula in Centaurus – OSC v1
Imaged at the IAS Hakos Observatory, Namibia with the 20″ Philipp Keller Cassegrain at full focal length of 4500 mm, f/9, this oddball object is listed both as a galaxy (PGC 49877) and a planetary nebula (Fr 2-8).
Fr 2-8 (Fr 1400-5102, AM 1357-504, LEDA 49877). This small nebula, about 2′ across, was found serendipitously from SHASSA field 057, while measuring a Hα flux from the nearby PN MeWe 2-4, and has been confirmed spectroscopically as a high-excitation PN, with the 2.3m MSSSO telescope. The position is coincident with the SIMBAD ‘galaxy’ AM1357-504 (Arp & Madore 1987). It had been independently noted as a PN by Cˆote et al. (1997), but no details were provided in their paper.
Continuing with the CGs, this one took really loooong, from mid January to mid February. Alas, CG season is also rain season in Namibia. Good for the country, but not so much for astrophotography.
CG 15 and CG 16 – Cometary Globules in Puppis/Carina – LHaRGB v1
Another CG image, completed just after Christmas Day, showing CG 15 (lower right) in Puppis and CG 16 (upper left) in Carina. Two more for the growing catalog of CGs here.
Difficult processing with these data: separating stars and galaxy with StarXTerminator doesn’t work well here, too many artefacts. So all the stretching was done with the starfull images, with just a bit of star reduction on L, to preserve the many little, mostly blue stars in the arms of NGC 300.
Some old narrowband data of the Helix was sitting for quite a while on my hard disk. Recently I started to adopt the “Foraxx” palette described in The Coldest Nights blog and used this technique with the SHO data, but combined both the SHO Foraxx and Bicolor Foraxx results, with a bit of RGB mixed in, and added RGB stars. Hope that the result isn’t too bad. ;-)