One of Astronomers' and Astrophotographers' favourite!
NGC 1952 / M1 The Crab Nebula is a supernova remnant and one of the earliest witnessed and recorded Supernova by humans in 1054 CE. The "guest star" was recorded by Native American, Japanese, Arabic and Chinese astronomers. The Nebula lies about 6500 light years away and is about 11 light years across. The central neutron star is a bright gamma-ray source. The nebula is expanding at ~1500 km/s.
This project was an experiment motivated by a
YouTube video by
@Franklin Marek of Seti Astro. Thank you, Frank.
I had shot this target in December 2023 with a OSC camera (ASI533MC Pro)and L-Extreme filter. The results were less than satisfactory. This year, 2024, I again shot this in Mono (ASI2600MMPro) in SHO with RGB stars. Again, for a multitude of reasons - sky conditions, neighbours chimney/roof and relatively low altitude (~36 degrees) and of course the weather (Clear skies, but heatwave and smoke from bushfires), I couldn't grab much data and was waiting for more. That's when I came across Frank's video and decided to give it a go.
I have combined the image taken with the OSC with the HOO image and RGB images taken with Mono using Frank's tutorial. Since I did not have enough native luminance data, I combined whatever I had with a synthetic luminance extracted from an SHO image to create a hybrid luminance image. Stars were separately extracted from RGB image and processed (as per usual) before recombination with the HOO-L image. Although it could use more data, I am reasonably satisfied with the results given my constraints.
Processed with Pixinsight and Affinity Photo. Some light post processing in DxO Lab 8.
Comments