Observations of M76
These are the observations available for M76. If you have any of your own that you'd like to submit we'd love to put them on the website.
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Messier 76 in Perseus
Image Courtesy of David Davies, Cambridge, UK.
For more images from David please visit his
Flickr Photostream.
David's Observation Notes.
Hello everyone,
The poor weather in late November meant that I was able to get out only twice, the 23rd and 29th. The 23rd was a new moon but the forecast was very poor for the next week so I decided to try Messier 76 in hydrogen alpha - at least that way I could return to it on the next fine night and capture more narrow band data, even though it might be close to full moon. Sure enough the next fine night the 29th was close to full moon and I returned to M76 and see what oxygen III and sulphur II data I could capture.
In the end I managed to capture two hours each of H-alpha, Oxygen III and Sulphur II. The core of M76 is relatively bright and showed up well but the outer regions are very faint and needed some teasing out in processing.
I've tried both a Hubble palette (red, green, blue is derived from sulphur, hydrogen and oxygen, respectively) and the less frequently seen HOS palette (red, green, blue is derived from hydrogen, oxygen and sulphur, respectively). The Hubble palette gives a predominantly blue image from which it was difficult to tease out any detailed structure. The HOS palette yielded a green/yellow and red image and more of the detail could be teased out by tweaking the colour balance in Photoshop.
So this is Messier 76 in HOS palette. Six hours of data was captured in 20 minute subs, equally split between hydrogen-alpha, oxygen III and sulphur II.
Image details
- Image Processing
- Pixinsight and Photoshop.
- Telescope
- 254 mm Newtonian with Tele Vue Paracorr at F/4.5
- Camera
- QSI 583wsg with Astrodon 3 nm narrow band filters. Off-axis guiding by SX Lodestar.
- Mount
- EQ6 controlled by EQMOD
