NGC 2070 Tarantula Nebula

One of the jewels of the southern hemisphere is the Large Magellanic Cloud.  I used to travel to Costa Rica to get a short glimpse of this.  On a longer trip to Australia in 2006 I spent an entire night with detailed charts moving from one object to the next using a portable 10" telescope and my eyes.

When I had the opportunity to start using the Chilescope this was one of the first objects I had in mind.  In October it was not in a favorable location until 3 AM, but that was fine with me.  I just queued the session and let the scope gather the data.

The full image is shown below.  Here is just the central part of the Tarantula at 66% size.

Location of NGC 2070 Tarantula Nebula

Above is a map in Alt Az as viewed from the Observatory. 

Annotated Image

The image is presented as North is left.

Zoomable Image

Processing Details

All images were processed by Pixinsight. 

I collected 180 second Lum data as well.  I found it difficult to color correct the resulting HDR image so I ended up not using these.

I added Halpha into the image using the Vicent Perez method

HCorrect = Halpha - (R - Med(R)) * 0.5
Red = Red +(HCorrect - Med(HCorrect)) * 8

where 0.5 and 8 were chosen for the desired result.

The bright stars were all A or brighter so I was not able to do a proper color calibration.  I just assumed that R=B=G.  Adding Halpha significantly increased the red channel in the resulting image.  It also converted several dark nebula areas into a more interesting dark red color.

This image benefited dramatically from using deconvolution. In my home images deconvolution is not usually useful since I work in wide field.  The extra magnification of the 500mm scopes introduced enough atmospheric distortion that deconvolution did produce a result.

The image was otherwise processed in my typical way.