Astronomy Now - January 2021

Picture of the month: Death’s head

Nik Szymanek says...

Our night sky is full of seasonal beauties such as the magnicent Andromeda Galaxy and the Orion
Nebula. e southern sky has its own marvels like the Eta Carina Nebula and has innumerable
other objects that make incredible imaging targets. is month’s winning entry sent in by Mike
Paling showcases one of those, NGC 2467 (also known as the Skull and Crossbones Nebula). It’s a
target that is full of intricate details, from dark dust lanes to enigmatic loops of nebulosity, cavities
and ‘sub’-nebulae that make it an imager’s dream target.

For this image Mike used the Telescope Live remote platform to acquire data with a 50cm
Newtonian reector and large-format FLI CCD camera. I’ve used this telescope myself, which is
located under pristine skies in Chile, and love its fast f/3.8 optics that deliver a wide eld of view
with crisp stars and is perfect for framing NGC 2467 in its entirety. is image was taken with
narrowband lters and then processed using the popular Hubble palette to deliver the blues and
golds that delineate structure within the nebula so well. Mike augmented the data with 600-second
sub-frames shot through RGB lters and this can be used to add some colours to the eld stars.

e Hubble palette reveals structural processes in the nebula very clearly and the contrasting colours,
predominantly revealed by the hydrogenalpha (gold) and oxygen-III (blue) lters, impart
magnicent three-dimensionality to the colour image. e aforementioned loops of nebulosity are
strangely similar to another unique southern hemisphere target, NGC 3576 (also known as the
Statue of Liberty Nebula). So, while we may lament that we can’t access these wonderful targets
from our back garden we can at least get great images of them using remote imaging platforms like
Telescope Live.

Puppis’ Skull and Crossbones Nebula (NGC 2467) is captured magnicently in this remote image from Mike Paling. He used a 50cm
(20-inch), f/3.8 telescope and a FLI PL 16083 CCD camera, part of Telescope Live’s equipment based at El Sauce Observatory in Río
Hurtado, Chile, to gather 3.5 hours of RGB/Ha/O-III/S-II data.

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Picture of the month: Death’s head

January 2021

Astronomy Now