Crab nebula M1

Eamonn,
Thats a fantastic shot, you can make out what I think are the ripples in the nebula cause by the pulsar,
I've never seen this object on such a massive image scale !!

Phil,

Sorry about the cheating Phil to obtain these results. I had to try the instrument out sometime on more exotic objects than boring survey work. Its rather like trying out your Farrari for its first run. It also feels good to try out for the start of the new year.

BTW, the actual size of the mirror is effectively 36.25 inches (0.93m). I just rounded it down to be more digestable. The Wynne corrector is big and heavy and is custom built. In fact the whole design and construction is custom built here at Kingsland, weighing in at about 3/4 ton. Normally the telescope is used 100% of the time for survey work on EKBOs where you need a wide a field of view as possible. This is the first time the telescope has seen first light using LRGB filters on nebulae and clusters. You would be surprised how effective the magnitude threshold in 30 seconds reaches 20 magnitude. Of course this depends on the sky transparency.

Dave,

I agree with you, I have never seen such structure in the Crab pulsar region as in this shot. The result is in the combination of excellent optics and large sensor with high QE. Tracking is good on long exposure durations eg. 300 secs exposures.

Eamonn A
MPC J62
www.kingslandobservatory.com

Hi Eamonn,
The extreme outer edges of the nebula are abit grainy, if you could apply some gaussian blur to these outer areas it would go along way to smooth out the nebula to the surrounding background sky.
Still, that's an excellent shot. !

Hi Dave,

Thanks for your suggestions. I'll look into this sometime.

This is an area that is still new to me, still learning post image processing methods to improve images.

Eamonn A
MPC J62
www.kingslandobservatory.com