Flame and Horsehead Nebulae

[Noel Carboni]

Yesterday I posted an image of the three belt stars of Orion. Near the "leftmost" (as viewed from northern hemisphere locations) belt star Alnitak we find a relatively bright patch of glowing hydrogen gas, centered in this collaborative image I did with my friend Greg Parker.

Hydrogen atoms that have been ionized by energetic ultraviolet light from nearby stars glow a deep red color. These are called emission nebulae. In some cases, dust is illuminated by the visible light from nearby stars and is seen as bluish-white - these are reflection nebulae. Finally, dark nebulae made of dense dust backlit by light from other nebulae or stars are known as absorption nebulae. The HorseHead itself, at the center of this image, is one of these.

The belt of Orion extends up and to the left from Alnitak, the brightest star in this image.

Believe it or not, the width of the Horsehead from "nose" to "mane" is 1000 times the diameter of the orbit of our own ex-planet Pluto. That's one big horse!

Approximately 10 hours exposure time over multiple nights and roughly the same amount of processing time went into this image.

-Noel

[Roman Kurywczak]

Hey Noel,
Hard to believe..........but I like this one better! Where it's positioned inthe frame works extremely well. Thanks for adding a story behind the image also. Just a joy to look at.

[Craig Carreno]

That is an amazng image!

[Brian Wong]

Hi Noel!

Just sitting back and enjoying your awesome work. This is amazing.

[Arthur Morris]

Yes to quite amazing. What equipment are you using? Why so long in the image optiimization???

[Robert Amoruso]

An amazing image Noel.

[Christine Hudnall]

Hi Noel - it's been a long time since I've been here (since March) so am glad that I caught these astros. You did good (and your friend too!) :)

You don't say what type of mount and tripod that you use or what program you use to process.

I'm always interested in hearing what others use - I use a Losmandy G-11 mount & tripod w/Gemini and process with Images Plus, finishing in Photoshop CS.

[Noel Carboni]

Thanks all!

The collaborative images we create are made through several telescopes all based on a wedge-mounted Celestron C11 with Celestron drive. In this particular case, the telescope was a Takahashi Sky-90 piggy-backed on the Celestron tube, with guiding running through the Celestron itself. The camera is a Starlight Xpress SXVF-M25C full color (Bayer pattern) purpose-built astro camera with an imager about the size of that in a Canon 40D. We typically can hold tracking to within a pixel with this setup, which yields marvelously sharp astro data. To say the physical setup has been highly tuned would be an understatement.

The raw captures are color converted and stacked in Maxim DL, then I go to work on them with Photoshop, using NASA/ESO FITS Liberator to import the files into Photoshop and perform initial stretching/brightening of the linear data. Once in Photoshop I use my own Astronomy Tools actions for a lot of the processing. One thing that sets my workflow apart from most is that I do virtually all the processing work in Photoshop, including flattening the luminance, hot pixel and noise reduction, color enhancement, deconvolution/sharpening, etc.

We have some exciting new optics that turn the Celestron into an f/2 astrograph with about a 550mm focal length. You'll be seeing some of our efforts through that optical setup in the near future. :)

Thanks again for your comments.

-Noel

[Christine Hudnall]

Okay - cool! I even own Astronomy Tools PS CS v1_2.:cool:

I kept staring at your name thinking, I know I know that name! As soon as I read you use your own actions the lightbulb clicked on.

Thanks and take care