NGC 1501, the Oyster Nebula

[Menno555]

Well, up and running here again: had a very bad flu (no covid though ), made the decision (and gamble) to go to Windows 11 Pro (totally clean install with no problems at all en "hacked" it so I now have a small taskbar with small icons and so on) and I lost all my backed up astro captures and calibration library due to a grave error on my side (recovery of files failed). But other than that, all is fine

This capture is from 31 Oktober: NGC 1501, the Oyster Nebula.
A planetary nebula in Camelopardalis and sits at around 4240 lightyears. It's kind of small with a apparent size of Jupiter and a apparent magnitude of 13. The structures in it are really cool and I even got a hint of the second outer shell

NGC 1501.jpg (517.15 KiB) Viewed 946 times

Bortle 6/7
Meade LX200 8" f/10 ACF OTA
Ioptron CEM25EC mount (no guiding)
Optolong L-eXtreme filter
Zwo ASI071MC Pro camera

Captured with SharpCap Pro @ -10 Celsius / White balance R50 B50
17 x 300sec / Gain 90 / Offset 4
20 x darks, 50 x flats and 50 x darkflats

Stacked with DeepskyStacker

Starless version with StarNet v2

Siril and Photoshop
Siril: Crop, Histogram, Background Extraction
Photoshop: starless version: Camera Raw Filter (darks, lightness, clarity, sharpening), noise reduction with NoiseXterminator plug-in.
Stars as overlay with a small amount of color strengthening.

[admin]

Hi Menno,

a very nice image of a delicate target - well done

Sorry to hear about the problem with data loss when transferring your PC - it's frustrating when something like that happens, especially when you think you have it all planned out and sorter. Still, good to hear all up and running again!

I did (finally) have covid about a month back. From the sound of it, it was less severe than your flu. If I hadn't tested, I would have been convinced it was a cold - and not a particularly bad one at that. I had all the usual cold symptoms in the usual order, no loss of smell/taste, no fever. Back in the old days if I'd had a cold like that I would have taken 1, maybe 2 days off work when it was at its worst.

cheers,

Robin

[timh]

Really nice Menno - I didn't even know that one existed and you have pulled out some real detail there. Interestingly homogenous-looking OIII signal with nothing much in NII or HA. Have so far put off Windows II but suppose that it will have to be done. Covid for me was pretty much just as you described Robin - sore throat for a couple of days - without a test kit would have had no idea at all. I guess that all those jabs we have had have been effective at minimising the symptoms for most folk.
Tim

Just as a PS ... looks like an ideal object to maybe try deconvolution on- especially given that it seems quite bright and your image scale being suitable?

[Menno555]

Thanks Robin and Tim
I have a external HDD for my astro back-up. But decided to make a new partition on that as boot disk with Windows 11 install on it. I used the Microsoft Media Creation Tool for that. Little did I know that that tool removes all partitions from the booting device and then makes a boot partition. All this without any warnings And it does a "good" job with that because of the thousands of files, recovery tools only found like around 20 or so to be recovered.

About deconvolution: in this case that didn't work that well. I tried but the Photoshop sharpening in the RAW filter worked best here.

Menno