K3's Astronomy - Messier Catalog
"When I consider your heavens, the work of your fingers, the moon and the stars which You have set in place, what is Man that You are mindful of him?" -- Psalm 8:3,4
M1 - The Crab Nebula
This famous nebula (8.4mag) is located 7,000 light-years away in the constellation Taurus. Its size is 10 light-years across. It is known thanks to its supernova remnant. The supernova was observed by Chinese astronomers in 1054 A.D.. It was so bright, that it was visible in daylight for more than 3 weeks. The colapsed core of the supernova is now observed as pulsar - rapidly rotating neutron star (30 revolutions per second!). The brightness of the pulsar is about 16mag.

Place mouse pointer above the photo to see supernova remnant (pulsar).
Click the image to see the full resolution (0.96"/pixel).		 M1 - The Crab Nebula. 03.02.2003 (02.02. 22:53 - 03.02. 00:52UT)
Resolution: 1.45 arcsec/pixel
Camera: Vesta 675SC2 at prime focus
Telescope: 8" F6 Orion Europa Newtonian
Result focal ratio: F6
Exposure: combining 59x50s (gain 100%), Amp OFF, 8xDF
Captured and processed by K3CCDTools, AVIDark, MaximDL Demo, Neat Image, Corel PhotoPaint
Seeing: temperature -8°C, average transparency

My new GP-DX presented its perfect performance. Very low periodic error (+/-7") allowed me to take 50s exposures at prime focus without guiding. According to sky charts (USNO-A catalog) it looks, that I overcame 19.0 mag limit!
Compare the picture to my previous pictures taken with the same scope, but with another mount. Now I can confirm, good mount is a half of good telescope.

Processing:
1, Captured AVI was processed by genial AVIDark from Jon Grove
2, 59 frames summed in K3CCDTools
3, Histogram stretching and gamma 1.80 in K3CCDTools
4, Exported to FIT
5, Histogram adjustment and color saturation 150% in MaximDL
6, Noise reduction by Neat Image
7, Resized to 66% + adaptive unsharp mask (75%) in Corel PhotoPaint

Click the image to see the full resolution (1.57"/pixel).		 M1 - The Crab Nebula. 16.02.2002 (15.02. 23:03 - 16.02. 00:25UT)
Resolution: 2.34 arcsec/pixel
Camera: Vesta 675SC at prime focus with 0.60FR
Telescope: 8" F6 Orion Europa Newtonian
Result focal ratio: F3.6
Exposure: combining 75x25s (gain 90%), 25xDF (K3CCDTools)
Seeing: lim.magnitude for naked eye 4.0, temperature 1°C

Summed image was a little blurred (Gaussian blur), then Unsharp Masked. The image was combined with the same image processed with IRIS (deconvolution) and soft color balance was applied.

Click the image to see the full resolution (1.57"/pixel).		 The same AVI source as above, but without IRIS deconvolution processing


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Last Update: 05.02.2003