Start of the two new projects, Barnard 30 & PuWe1 PNAstro Aanarchy

Start of the two new projects, Barnard 30 & PuWe1 PN

Barnard 30, a dark nebula in Sh2-264, in Orion

Ra 05^h 31^m 42^s Dec +12° 12′ 39"

A gray scale image of H-alpha emission. I'll shoot more H-a and rest of the emission lines,

needed for a color image, later.

Barnard 30 is a dark nebula at Orion's head, due the proximity of eye catchers of Orion Nebula and low surface brightness, this target is rarely imaged.

B30 is part of the very large Sharpless object in Orion's head, Sh2-264. This large nebula spans 8 degrees of sky, that's 16 full Moons side by side, whole upper part of this image is covered with Sh2-264. Above image is about three degrees wide.

B30 lies about 1300 light years from Earth, above the triangular group of stars marking the head of constellation Orion.

Latest data from a Spitzer Space Telescope indicates, that this area is a star-birth region with many low mass stars and brown dwarfs.

This image will need much more exposures, at the moment it's too dim and noisy. It'll take some time, since nights are getting shorter and I can shoot this one only two hours, before it's too low.

Processing work flow:

Image acquisition, MaxiDL v5.07.

Stacked and calibrated in CCDStack.

Levels, curves and color combine in PS CS3.

Equipments:

Tokina AT-X 300mm f2.8 @ f2.8

Platform and guiding, Meade LX200 GPS 12" @ f5

Camera, QHY9

Guider, Lodestar

Image Scale, 3,79 arc seconds/pixel

Exposures:

Baader H-alpha 7nm 8x1200s, binned 1x1

PuWe1, a Planetary Nebula in Lynx

Ra 06^h 19^m 34^s Dec +55° 36′ 42"

A gray scale image of H-alpha emission. I'll shoot more H-a and rest of the emission lines,

needed for a color image, later.

Note.

I don't usually publish an image so unfinished but this time I'll like to show a new finding, least it's new to me.

I have never seen an outer halo at any image of PuWe1, there is not too many of them though.

It seems to span about 100 arc minutes, the actual circular body of nebula is about 20 arc minutes wide.

It looks like, that there is a dim brightening at right hand side of the outer halo.

I'll shoot much more lights for this later, then I can confirm, if the halo seen here is 100% real.

PuWe1, (Purgathofer-Weinberger 1, PNG 158.9 + 17.8, PK 158+17.1) is a large circular Planetary Nebula in the constellation of Lynx. It has an apparent diameter of 20' (Outer halo seems to be about 100' wide, if it's rely there) Nebula is very very faint and will need many hours more exposures for better contrast and colors.