Illuminating The Iris Nebula

Insight Observatory had the opportunity to be involved in another imaging collaborative. This time, a mosaic image of The Iris Nebula, also known as NGC 7023 and Caldwell 4. This deep-sky object is a bright reflection nebula in the constellation Cepheus. Paul Swift, a talented and well-known astrophotographer teamed up with another accomplished astrophotographer, Carmelo Falco, to produce this illuminating image of the Iris Nebula below.

Mosaic image of The Iris Nebula, also known as NGC 7023 processed by Paul Swift using data collected by Carmelo Falco, Insight Observatory, and the majority of the data by Paul himself.

This mosaic of the Iris Nebula is made up of data from different focal lengths. 380mm, 1330mm, 1525mm, and 3400mm. This image shows some magenta at the core in the form of reddish photoluminescence. The data collected by Paul Swift was from his backyard in Valencia, Spain. His setup consists of VSD Vixen 380mm and 14" Orion Optics AG 1330mm Newtonian astrograph on a Paramount MX mount, an SX-46 CCD camera with an SX Maxi wheel (with Luminance, Red, Green and Blue filters) from Starlight Xpress Ltd.

The central area image data of the nebula was collected by Carmelo using a 16" f/7.8 (customed 3400mm) Ritchey-Chretien telescope on an RM500 mount accompanied by an Apogee Asping GG16m CCD camera, Orion SteadyStar - Lodestar guiding system, and a Baader Luminance, Red, Green and Blue filter set.

The Three imaging systems used to collect data of NGC 7023, The Iris Nebula. Carmelo Falco's 16" f/7.8 Ritchey-Chretien (left), Paul Swift's 14" Orion Optics AG (above right), and Insight Observatory's 16" f/3.7 Dream astrograph reflector, ATEO-1, (lower right).

Additional Luminance data for the outer areas of the nebula was collected by Insight Observatory's 16" f/3.7 astrograph reflector, ATEO-1. This image data was purchased by Mr. Swift as part of Insight's "Datasets on Demand" service where astrophotographers may request data to be acquired from ATEO-1 and ATEO-2A for the purpose of combining the image data with their own. After delivery of the requested image data, it is then added to the Starbase dataset library. Starbase is a deep-sky dataset subscription service that will be accessible via Insight Observatory's ATEO Portal this mid-summer.

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Eagle Nebula Collaboration Project

Insight Observatory's remote telescope was recently involved in a deep-sky imaging collaboration between two experienced astrophotographers. Utkarsh Mishra and Zhuoqun Wu teamed up to combine and process datasets resulting in the image below of Messier 16, The Eagle Nebula. The Luminance, Red, Green, and Blue data was acquired by Utkarsh with Insight Observatory's 16" astrograph reflector (ATEO-1) hosted in Pie Town, New Mexico, and the H-Alpha data was taken from Chilescope by Zhuoqun using a 20" ASA Newtonian astrograph. The data files were stacked using PixInsight and processed in Adobe Photoshop.

Insight Observatory has recently had an increase in deep-sky dataset subscribers that are involved in image collaborations with other astrophotographers using equipment at other locations around the world. Very exciting!

Messier 16, the Eagle Nebula imaged by Utkarsh Mishra and Zhuoqun Wu. 10 300-second Luminance, 14 300-second Red, 11 300-second Green, and 10 300-second Blue frames taken from ATEO-1 along with 50-Minutes of H-Alpha data acquired from Chilescope.

The Eagle Nebula (cataloged as Messier 16 or M16, and as NGC 6611, and also known as the Star Queen Nebula and The Spire) is a young open cluster of stars in the constellation Serpens, discovered by Jean-Philippe de Chéseaux in 1745–46. Both the "Eagle" and the "Star Queen" refer to visual impressions of the dark silhouette near the center of the nebula, an area made famous as the "Pillars of Creation" imaged by the Hubble Space Telescope. The nebula contains several active star-forming gas and dust regions, including the aforementioned Pillars of Creation.

The Eagle Nebula is part of a diffuse emission nebula, or H II region, which is cataloged as IC 4703. This region of active current star formation is about 7000 light-years distant. A spire of gas that can be seen coming off the nebula in the northeastern part is approximately 9.5 light-years or about 90 trillion kilometers long.

Source: Wikipedia

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Euclid: Challenge the Machines

There is a new Astronomy project by Zooniverse available that anyone with an internet connection can get involved with...

Have you ever wondered what shape the Universe is? What about dark matter and dark energy? Would you like to know what they are and how they behave? If the answer to any of these questions is “yes”, then you aren’t alone. The quest to understand these mysterious and fundamental phenomena occupies many professional astronomers and cosmologists on a daily basis.

This artist's concept shows ESA's Euclid Space Telescope, to which NASA is contributing. Image credit: ESA/C. Carreau.

To gather the observational data that they need in order to test our theories, scientists and engineers from around the world designed the Euclid Space Telescope. Euclid will survey a huge area of the sky in unprecedented detail, providing exquisite images of millions of galaxies spanning the history of the Universe from just 4 billion years after the Big Bang, right up until the present day. For a tiny fraction of the galaxies that Euclid will observe, the light that they emit will be distorted by a phenomenon called "gravitational lensing". Gravitational lensing happens when the light from one distant galaxy passes close to another foreground galaxy on its journey to Earth. The gravity of the foreground galaxy bends the light around it, acting like a lens and distorting the distant galaxy’s image in distinctive ways. If we can find enough gravitational lenses and study their properties, we’ll be many steps closer to understanding the most fundamental constituents and properties of our Universe.

Examples of lensed galaxies are blue arcs around a central object.

To learn how to do this Zooniverse needs your help! They have millions of galaxies to search for gravitational lensing signatures and it turns out that doing this automatically is really difficult. Simple computer algorithms just aren’t up to the task and modern AI techniques need gigantic sets of pre-labeled training data to be effective. On the other hand, volunteers like you only need to see a few examples to become very adept lens spotters. Euclid: Challenge the Machines is a brand new Zooniverse project that asks you to identify simulated gravitational lenses that the automated searches might miss so that we can learn how to do better. They hope that your classifications can be used to teach the machines what to look for so that they can do the really heavy lifting and find every single lens that those millions of galaxy images contain.

Get involved at https://www.zooniverse.org/projects/hughdickinson/euclid-challenge-the-machines/classify. 

As well as the browser version of this project, this project is available to complete using the app version of Zooniverse. The app version allows you to swipe yes or swipe no for each image, speeding up classifying the galaxies (and it is more fun). The Zooniverse app is available for both Android and iOS and can be downloaded for free from the Google Play Store and the App Store for Android and iOS respectively.

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