Skull & Crossbones


NGC2467 is an emission nebula in the constellation Puppis, and about 17,000 light-years from Earth.  It is often referred to as the “Skull & Crossbones Nebula”, and I think you can easily see skull shape, but the cross bones are not obvious to me.  The red extends to the upper left in something like a broad line, and the lower left is certainly extended, but is really just a blob.  With a lot of imagination I guess you could see these features extending to the upper right and lower right to form an X.

This is from the remote observatory in Australia.  Sadly, I have discontinued my arrangement there, so this is one of the last images I got.  Since I will not be selling astrophoto prints after my inventory is gone, I couldn’t justify the expense of continuing there.  There are a few images I haven’t processed yet, but I don’t think there’s anything very exciting among them.

This is an RGB image, although it could have been done in narrowband, as there is a lot of oxygen in the area in addition to the hydrogen that dominates this image (the red nebulosity), but I did not manage to capture any narrowband data before my time was up.  In fact, this is only about 8 hours of exposure, using 20 minute sub-exposures on L, R, G, and B.  Since there was relatively little L (luminence) data I created a so-called “super-luminence” channel by blending all of the RGB channels with the L to improve the signal to noise ratio.

 


About Greg Marshall

I am a retired electronics engineer and after a few months of enjoying my leisure I began to miss doing product development. My astronomy hobby always needed new solutions to unique problems, so I decided that whenever I came up with a good solution I would try to make it available to others.

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