Our Top 3 Winners
1st
Name – Rowan Prangley
Object – NGC7293, The Helix Nebula
The beautiful bright core region of NGC7293 is home to a dying sun-like star whose—almost—circumstellar nebulous regions have been expanding and evolving during its final phase of stellar evolution. Affectionately called, “The Helix Nebula” and “God’s Eye”, the Planetary Nebula structure is one of the most well studied and imaged celestial bodies in the nights sky.
Exploring this target using narrowband imaging techniques utilising the emission lines of Hydrogen Alpha (Ha), Oxygen III (O-III) and Sulfur II (S-II), this highlights not just the broader and intensely strong knots and large-scale emission arcs of the inner core, but it also makes it possible to discover several jets, many faint bipolar outflows causing bow-shaped filaments and bow shocks, as well as successive event-lead halos.
It has been a pleasure capturing The Helix Nebula and I’ve spent far too much time resolving it, albeit, as the clear nights progressed the extra integration times has been both fortuitus and prosperous! To-date, I have not found an image that fully resolves the most outer nebulous regions. A paper tilted, “Discovery of A Halo Around The Helix Nebula NGC 7293 In The Wise All-Sky Survey” by Zhang et al proposes the existence of jets located north-east of the nebula; excitingly, the image presented resolves not one but the existence of five jets!
A portion of time was spent to capture red, green, and blue (RGB) stars and these have been added to create richer star colours. The image has been presented with a wider field-of-view to honour this.
Imaging Telescopes – Celestron RASA 36cm (14″)
Imaging Cameras – QHYCCD QHY268M
Mount – 10Micron GM3000 HPS
2nd
Name – Paul Montague
Object – NGC 1398
NGC 1398, in the constellation Fornax, is a beautiful barred spiral galaxy with a ring structure. This image was taken in outback South Australia with an 8 inch Ritchey-Chretien telescope, with about 14 hours total exposure with a ZWO ASI294MM-Pro monochrome camera and Chroma LRGB filters.
3rd
Name – Michael Sidonio
Object – M104, The Sombrero Galaxy
M104 The Sombrero Galaxy
This famous galaxy in Virgo has a wonderful disc shape with a dominant yellow hue, the result of the many old stars in its gigantic spherical halo, coupled with the large amount of dust in the disc of the galaxy, which causes interstellar reddening. Some younger hot blue stars can however be identified in the outer disc as a subtle blue glow. The disc of the galaxy has a detailed, thick and obscuring dust lane and is seen almost edge on from our vantage point, some 50 Million light years away. The galaxy gets its quirky name from its resemblance to the brim of the venerable Mexican hat. Many distant faint background galaxies and galaxy clusters can also be seen, strewn across the frame.
Location: Tinderry Mountains NSW
Telescope: 12 inch F3.8 corrected Newtonian
Imaging camera: Starlightxpress TRIUS PRO-694 Midi Combi PRO Blue Edition incl. CFW & OAG
Guide Camera: Starlightxpress Lodestar PRO
Exposure: LRGB = 570min, 60min, 60min, 60min Total 12.5 hrs
Filters: Astronomik Deep-Sky LRGB
-20C chip temp, flats used but no dark frames.
Focal length: 1120mm
Image scale: 0.84″/pix
FLI Atlas Focuser
Data collected 11, 16 & 18 June 2023, new moon, good seeing (FWHM of individual Lum frames 1.5″-1.9″) with excellent transparency.