Starship Asterisk*

NGC4565 - Field around Needle Galaxy
Location : Italian Alps (Imagna's Valley)
Web Site: www.astroefrem.com
Copyright: Efrem Frigeni Link dedicated Page and full resolution : https://www.astroefrem.com/gallery/blog ... c4565.html

Re-processed The Flying Dragon Nebula
Click on image to Enlarge.

Full info @ https://www.kinchastro.com/sh2-114---th ... ragon.html

The Microbial Ultra Deep Field

(High resolution here)

Copyright: Quentin De Meur
https://www.astrobin.com/users/OlympusMons-UMONS/


While doing astrophotography a hobby, as a doctor in microbiology, I'm used to counting microbes in various environmental samples. And sometimes those two passions appear not to be as different as we might think they are!

The present submission depicts a few square millimeter area of a ... Petri dish (a kind of container holding growth medium in which cells can be cultured) ! All the observable structures are colonies of various fungal or bacterial microbes that we actually can find in soils. And, not so surprisingly, I was stunned to find out how much this field of microbes looked like the famous Hubble Ultra Deep Field.

This natural "ability" to associate a newly observed structure to an already known object or concept is known as a "pareidolia". The most common example of this phenomenon (that we probably all have already experienced) is the perception of animals or objects in cloud formations.

Feel free to ask any supplemental information.


Clear sky (and plates),

Quentin De Meur

Title: MINERAL MOON ISS TRANSIT: THE VIDEO



This is a video submission (Flickr allows videos, but sadly the preview only as a static thumbnail). There is also a composite photo available:



Description:
Shot on 26th of March in Republic of Moldova, with the event taking place at 22:19:00 local time (duration just 0.7 seconds). I pulled the trigger on actually attempting to capture it on the evening before, when I saw a chance to get a proper weather around the transit time. Pinged my good old friend and asked him to help me out. He agreed, so 2 hours hours before the transit we hit the road! We were fully ready just 20 seconds before the event, very tight timing. But everything went just fine, we saw the ISS passing in front of the Moon and couldn't be happier! Afterwards we stayed to shoot additional material, so I could attempt to assemble a mineral Moon, something I never did before with my astrocams (DSLRs worked for me before, but my planetary astrocams are monochrome). I have a filter wheel and a Baader LRGB filters set, so it was totally doable. But I didn't expect it to be so awesome, the result turned out to be incredible. ISS was cropped out and stacked separately, to improve clarity and sharpness. It worked wonders, ISS' details showed up nicely and crisp. Final touch - putting it back, exactly in the positions it had on the captured RAW frames

Alexandru Barbovschi wrote: ↑Wed Mar 31, 2021 1:23 am Title: MINERAL MOON ISS TRANSIT: THE VIDEO



This is a video submission (Flickr allows videos, but sadly the preview only as a static thumbnail). There is also a composite photo available:



Description:
Shot on 26th of March in Republic of Moldova, with the event taking place at 22:19:00 local time (duration just 0.7 seconds). I pulled the trigger on actually attempting to capture it on the evening before, when I saw a chance to get a proper weather around the transit time. Pinged my good old friend and asked him to help me out. He agreed, so 2 hours hours before the transit we hit the road! We were fully ready just 20 seconds before the event, very tight timing. But everything went just fine, we saw the ISS passing in front of the Moon and couldn't be happier! Afterwards we stayed to shoot additional material, so I could attempt to assemble a mineral Moon, something I never did before with my astrocams (DSLRs worked for me before, but my planetary astrocams are monochrome). I have a filter wheel and a Baader LRGB filters set, so it was totally doable. But I didn't expect it to be so awesome, the result turned out to be incredible. ISS was cropped out and stacked separately, to improve clarity and sharpness. It worked wonders, ISS' details showed up nicely and crisp. Final touch - putting it back, exactly in the positions it had on the captured RAW frames

My bad, forgot the technical details! Here they are:

Sky-Watcher Star Adventurer mount (it has a lunar tracking mode available) + Sky-Watcher Evostar 72ED (72/420mm) + filter wheel with Baader LRGB filters set (for the transit UV/IR filter was used) + Barlow 2x + ZWO ASI174MM camera. To get the color shot R, G and B channels, 3000 frames per each (and 3000 more through UV/IR filter, which was used as L channel later on). As Moon doesn't fit the field in this configuration, two panels were shot. ISS cropped out manually using Gimp; stacked and sharpened using cvAstroAlign (25 frames out of 70 went into stack); later on got ISS out using Gimp. Moon stacked using AutoStakkert! 3, then aligned the channels using PlanetarySystemLRGBAligner, then combined to obtain RGB using ImageMagick; L channel added in Gimp. Then assembled the panorama using Hugin. Post-processing in RawTherapee. Adding ISS back using Gimp

"Soul nebula" (IC 1848) in SHO
Full version : https://astrob.in/full/s89381/0/

Takahashi TSA102 - AZEQ6 - Atik Cameras Atik16200
Ha : 50 x 900s bin1
OIII : 36 x 600s bin 2
SII : 36 x 600s bin 2

Many thanks to Bernard Michaud who kindly provided me his SII layer in order to reinforce my own SII layer !

22, 23, 24 & 25 August 2019 - Fouras (France)
Pixinsight & PS

Copyright: Jean-Baptiste Auroux
https://millenniumphoton.com/
https://www.astrobin.com/users/Jean-Baptiste_Paris/

Perseus molecular cloud by 虞 骏, on Flickr

Perseus molecular cloud

The Perseus molecular cloud, located at the junction of Taurus, Aries, and Perseus, about 1,000 light-years away from the Earth. It contains over 10,000 solar masses of gas and dust covering an area of 6 by 2 degrees, is the closest giant molecular cloud actively forming large numbers of low to intermediate-mass stars. Unlike the Orion molecular cloud, Perseus molecular cloud is almost invisible apart from two clusters, IC 348 and NGC 1333, where low-mass stars are formed.

By accumulating a very-long-time of exposure, the dust and gas show up, exhibit a complex and chaotic structure consisting of dense cloud cores surrounded by an interconnected network of filaments and sheets. Many voids surrounded by partial arcs or nearly complete rings are also seen. This complicated structure is one possible signature of supersonic turbulence.

The eastern (upper) end of the cloud is associated with IC 348 that contains several hundred young stars. Most of the star formation in IC 348 took place within the last 3 Myr, but some stars in this region formed 10 Myr ago. The apparent age spread in IC 348 may be an indication that two episodes of star formation have occurred. IC 348 appears to be an example of a region that is at or near the end of its star-forming phase.

The western (lower) portion of the Perseus cloud contains the most active region of star formation in the Perseus molecular cloud, including the NGC 1333 cluster. It contains around 150 stars with a median age of a million years, is one of the most active sites of ongoing star formation in the sky within 1500 light-years of the Sun. The molecular ridge extending south (left) from NGC 1333 contains many Herbig–Haro objects, which are bright patches of nebulosity associated with newborn stars.

Between IC 348 and NGC 1333, right in the middle of this photo, there is an area that appears pinky, which is a low-surface brightness HII region surrounded by a dust ring G159.6-18.5, which appears to lie behind the obscuration of the Perseus molecular cloud. The intense ultraviolet light emitted by the central star HD 278942 ionizes the surrounding hydrogen, giving this region its characteristic pink color. The star appears red in this photo and would have been a blue-white star if it were not obscured by dust. The presence of HD 278942 and its HII region suggests that that massive stars may have formed in the recent past within the Perseus molecular cloud.

BTW, the cloud of dust, which obscures the central star and the HII region, is called the“Flying Ghost Nebula” because of its shape.

The area to the west (lower) of the HII region looks relatively empty without too much dense dust, and particularly dark here because the extinction in this region remains high. Perhaps this dead-zone is the youngest portion of the Perseus molecular cloud, formed by the expansion of the dust ring G159.6-18.5.

There are more areas full of dense dust to the south (left) of NGC 1333, see another photo I took if you are interested: https://www.astrobin.com/ggdhla/C/

Location: Galaxy Remote Observatory, Kangbao, Hebei, China
Time: October 18, 2020 - February 7, 2021
Telescope: SharpStar 150 2.8 HNT
Camera: QHY268C
Mount: iOptron CEM70/CEM60
Guide: QHYCCD OAG-M
Guide camera: QHY5L-II-M
Mosaic: 4 panels
Number of shots: 137×1000 seconds, 523×300 seconds
Cumulative exposure: 81.6 hours
Acquired by APT
Processed by PixInsight and PhotoShop

For a larger image, please see the link: https://www.astrobin.com/fiyi3z/

D810A

Water World

After a long time planning, in mid-March/21 I finally managed to realize my dream of photographing Iguazu Falls at night.
I knew that the challenge would be great, after all, you need a special authorization from the National Park to shoot at night. One reason for this is that the park is home to several wild animals, including Jaguar, which are frequently seen in the region.
Having obtained the authorization, the challenge now was to be able to take long exposure photographs close to the more than 270 waterfalls in the place. The water spray generated in the place is very intense, and when you approach the main waterfalls you have the impression that you are photographing, literally, inside the shower.
This image was the first one I captured when I arrived at my main location, right on my first night at work. In it we can see the Santa Maria jump, one of the main falls of the complex, the Milky Way cloud on the left and the Magellanic clouds on the right. In the Milky Way region we can identify the Southern Cross and the Eta Carinae Nebula region.
The result of this unprecedented work in Landscape Astrophotography in the main region of the Iguaçu Falls on the Brazilian side has been gaining prominence in the media in Brazil.

4x 16mm | f/2.8| 30 sec | ISO 6400