Stellar Shot of the Week: August 20, 2021
"Sh2-224 - Supernova Remnant in HOO" (by Douglas J. Struble)
Congratulations to this week's Stellar Shot selection, which goes to the venerable Douglas Struble! If it seems like you see a lot of Doug's images you would be correct, but with results like these who can blame us? We're still trying to figure out who Doug has been bribing to get so many usable imaging hours, but just this image was over 100 hours of data (not to mention all the time spent processing). As usual this is from his suburban Bortle 8 location too, so for everyone else dealing with light pollution it's worth noting that results like these can still be obtaining. Doug was kind enough to do a wonderful write-up on this target (as always), so for more information we now turn you over to the man himself.
"Even with over 100 hours of integration time, I still had a major challenge processing this data at f/7. In addition, even though I used narrowband filters, these fainter objects still get affected by my heavy light pollution. I had to push it really hard to get the detail I wanted out of it. Subsequently I had a lot of processing artifacts to clean up as well. This is the first time I have done over 100 hours of integration time and the first time I did all that within the same season of the same year. We were fortunate to have a lot of clear nights recently, which is the first time for me this time of year here in Michigan since I started astrophotography in 2016.
The technical details of this shot are as follows:
- Astrobin Link: https://www.astrobin.com/5r0ico/
- Integration Time: 101.3 Hours
- Bortle Dark-Sky Scale: 8.00
- Completion Date: 3-18-21
- Location: Taylor, MI (EST) USA
- Imaging Telescope: Stellarvue SVX102T-R
- Aperture: 102mm
- Camera: ZWO ASI1600MM-Cooled
- Filters: Astrodon Ha & OIII with RGB Stars
- Software: SGP, PHD2, PixInsight & Photoshop CC"
