21.82 SQM READING AT WUPATKI

So I was at Wupatki two nights ago and recorded readings between 21.7 and 21.82 at Wupatki after the moon went down.   Even with the moon up, the SQM read about 21.5 to 21.6.

21.82 is the darkest reading I've measured ANYWHERE.  

Just a light pollution map NE of Flagstaff showing the Wupatki area.

It's pretty dark at Wupatki.  I don't think people understand how dark it is.   We recently
took some relatives from the east coast out there and I got the feeling they were actually
uncomfortable with how dark it was.

The light dome of Flagstaff is visible, but at the Doney Moutain Picnic area the light
is blocked by two small hills.   I've seen darker skies near the Grand Canyon, the Texas Star Party, and some places in western Nevada.   But overall, it's a nice site.   M33 is often visible naked-eye.
A lot of so-called amateur astronomers don't understand what that means.   :/

M16 -- Eagle Nebula

I was at Kentucky Camp this summer with Charles and I only focused on one target.   So, this is 20 x 30 min of H-alpha stacked and processed in PixInsight, but also tweaked a little in Photoshop.  Taken with the Explore Scientific 80mm F/6 refractor and the Atik One CCD.

I have color data from the T3i taken through the Tak.  So, my next dreaded step is to figure out how to register this H-a image and combine it with the color image.  I know I can do it in theory...

NGC 281 ...what a pain!

From the Mountains of Madness...

NGC 281, aka Pacman Nebula...

I'm completely not happy with this image.   24 x 10 min exposures, Canon T3i, 1600 ISO.  Scope was the Tak TSA-102 at F/8.  So much noise and noise reduction that it was a miserable experience.   99% PixInsight, 1% Photoshop.   Probably about 40 hours of processing for this meagre image.

It's my fault that I didn't get out there again and collect another 2-3 nights of data.  That would
have made it much easier to process, and I would've had much more detail.

Yes, I'm aware of the halos around the bright stars!   Yes, I could put in another 3-6 hours to get the halos under control, but I'm exhausted and need to move on...

I still have a M16 image to process, but after that, I'm hoping to retire the T3i.

Astrometry Plate Solving

I was going through my folder with NGC 281 images and came across a single 5 minute image of a bright star using my Canon T3i and an H-alpha filter.  I processed it slightly in PS because it looked like there were hints of nebulosity around the bright star.  So I resized it and uploaded it to nova.astrometry.net to have it plate-solved.

It was Betelgeuse!   And looking through some deeper images of Rogelio's, I noticed that there isn't much in his images of the Betelgeuse region.  Could be stuff here to image.   Those NGC objects in the northern section of the image are listed as "non-objects" in the NGC/IC project.

Studying the image in more detail...   Looks like the round nebulosity near the top is
the back end of the Angelfish Nebula which is centered around Meissa.  But the nebulosity to the right of Betelgeuse remains somewhat mysterious.

Just a single frame of the Pacman Nebula (NGC 281)

This is just a single 10 minute frame of NGC 281 massaged in Photoshop.   I wanted to post it as a point of comparison.   I will be processing a small stack in PixInsight over the next couple days.

When I push the curves in Photoshop I can see a hints of nebulosity around this object.  But no one seems to have a deep image of it.   Hm.....

PixInsight Workshop

Just doing some catch up...


Back in May, I attended an imaging workshop in Tucson.   Six days of intense imaging instruction with a knowledgeable gentleman named Vicent Peris.  

Though we probably sat down for 6-8 hours a day, it was a great jump start into the software.

Screenshot of the PixInsight interface while working on a Milky Way shot.