Keyhole Nebula Near Eta Carina

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Keyhole Nebula Near Eta Carina

[Public Domain] 12 Apr 2017 Dylan O'Donnell
CATEGORY : Astrophotography
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During the recent “Stargazing Live” TV broadcast with Brian Cox the AAO telescope took an image “live” during the broadcast. In reality, much of the data for the photo had been gathered the previous night and they quickly finished processing it during the show. It was a photo of the Keyhole Nebula taken and processed by Angel R. Lopez-Sanchez who graciously provided me some details about the image.

Their image is stunning and deep, which is to be expected with a 12.7 meter telescope! But the colour is “false”, with separate narrowband filters mapped to various colour channels. It’s a nice palette and I’ll give it a go sometime

This version I’ve done with my little backyard telescopes uses a colour camera to capture it’s natural-eye colouring.

It’s one of the best I’ve managed so far I think, thanks to some recent equipment and software upgrades.

I’m becoming slightly obsessed with this massive nebula and have imaged and re-imaged it over and over. It’s filled with amazing features and mysteries and in this single photo many of Hubble’s famous shots were taken. I encourage you to click this link and see the keyhole area enlarged : https://deography.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/04/ETA-CAR-PI-HA-CROPPED.jpg

And here is the high res link to the full wide format photo : https://deography.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/04/Mosaic-LRGB-2560.jpg

Also you might have noticed during the Brian Cox “Stargazing Live”‘s third night they featured and discussed one of my false colour narrowband photos as well! I was super excited to be involved and it was a wonderful television event for Australian audiences.

For the techies : 2 Panel Mosaic – 61 x 2m Ha @ 1480mm / f6.3 / QHY9m using c9.25″ Edge HD + 21 x 1m Combined as LRGB with RGB @ 620mm / f2 / QHY12 using C11″ RASA. CGX Mount. Processing PI & Photoshop, Total Integration 143 minutes.

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EQUIPMENT DYLAN USED
Here is some of the gear this photo was made with. Click for info