
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.
More details at Astrobin.
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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.
More details at Astrobin.
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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).
Quoting from Planetary Nebulae in the Solar Neighbourhood: Statistics, Distance Scale and Luminosity Function by David John Frew
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.
Interestingly enough, the team around IAS member Uwe Glahn observed this object visually at Hakos back in 2009.
More details at Astrobin.
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Continuing the growing catalog of cometary globules, here comes CG 14.
More details and full resolution at Astrobin.
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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.
Part of the ever growing CG catalog here at Photography > Astrophotography > Cometary Globules.
As always, more details at Astrobin.
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More remote data from 2025. NGC 131, NGC 134 and Eta Sculptoris.
And more details at Astrobin.
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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.
More details at Astrobin coming soon.
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CG season is also rain season in Namibia, so it took a while to gather enough data for image, adding to the growing catalog of CGs here.
More details at Astrobin coming soon.
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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.
More details at Astrobin.
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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. ;-)
See an older post for a “classic” rendering of NGC 7293.
More details at Astrobin (70 % crop).
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[Updated image]
Has been quite a while since I last imaged this large, beautiful spiral galaxy in the southern constellation of Sculptor, NGC 253 known as the Silver Dollar Galaxy, Silber Coin Galaxy, or just Sculptor Galaxy.
A lot of H-alpha data has been used, thus the rendition is different from the DSLR attempts back in 2016.
More Details at Astrobin.
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