WWW.ASTRONOMY.COM 33
view of about 4.5° square. We equipped an
SBIG STX-16803 camera with an Astrodon
3 nm Oxygen-III (OIII) filter, a 5 nm
Hydrogen-alpha (Hα) filter, and
Generation 2 RGB filters.
We took exposures from September
9–22, 2017, with the iTelescope.net site near
Siding Spring, New South Wales, Australia.
The panels are centered around
R.A. 5h21m59s, Dec. –68°20'12", allowing
for a 10 percent overlap among the panels.
That choice was a compromise between
attaining the largest coverage and provid-
ing enough overlap to register the images.
The calibrated and processed master
images from each of the four panels were
registered to a master image of the LMC
downloaded from the internet to act as a
template. Before using it, however, the tem-
plate was upsized to about 11,000 by 11,000
pixels to accommodate the side-by-side
4,000-by-4,000-pixel individual panels. All
the exposures were registered using the
program Registar.
We colorized the Hα data to a standard
red/magenta, following the same process
with the OIII data to transform it to
blue/green. We also took an extra step and
blended in a superluminance layer. It con-
tains both the Hα and OIII data, as well as
high-resolution data of many individual
deep-sky objects we’d previously taken
through a 20-inch PlaneWave CDK20 cor-
rected Dall-Kirkham ref lector. This helped
bring out more detail, especially in the
emission nebulae.
We sincerely want to thank Sakib
Rasool, who helped produce the original
annotations that formed a guide to the
labels included here.
The LMC lies 163,000 light-years away
and straddles the boundary between
Dorado and Mensa. It is the fourth-largest
galaxy in the Local Group, after the
Andromeda Galaxy (M31), the Milky Way,
and the Pinwheel Galaxy (M33).
Don Goldman and Josep Drudis are
observatory partners sharing equipment
at the iTelescope.net facility at Siding Spring,
New South Wales, Australia.
N83
NGC 2014
N186
N63
N185
N189
N64
N11
N59
NGC 1770
N9
NGC 1910
N55
N51
N160
N154b
NGC 1966
N204
NGC 2070
N70 N44
NGC 1949
NGC 1920
NGC 1895
N30B
NGC 1829
N120
NGC 1876
DEM L174
NGC 1919
N30A
NGC 1846
NGC 1852
NGC 1727
NGC 1850
NGC 1858
NGC 1881
NGC 2074
NGC 2080
NGC 2020
N158
N159