NGC 2170 Angel Nebula

[timc]

Attached is an image of the bright reflection nebula NGC 2170, the Angel Nebula in the equatorial constellation of Monoceros.  NGC 2170 lies approximately 2,700 light-years away from us and it is part of Monoceros R2, one of the closest massive star forming regions to the Sun.  The Angel Nebula is the brightest and westernmost part of the Monoceros R2 giant molecular cloud and infrared observations have revealed signs of ongoing star formation in the nebula. The massive young stars are concealed by the thick dust clouds and cannot be seen in visible light, but they shine in the infrared band. Their strong winds and radiation are responsible for shaping the nebula’s dust and gas.

 I used a remote robotic telescope in Siding Spring Observatory in Australia operated by itelescope.net to capture the data.  The image consists of the following 300s exposures: Lx14 unbinned, Rx15, Gx15 Bx18, Hax7 each binned x2 totalling 345 minutes (5 hours 45 minutes) of imaging time acquired over 5 sessions between 22 December 2022 and 31 December 2022.  The telescope I used was a Planewave 20 inch (0.51m) diameter Corrected Dall-Kirkham reflector astrograph at f4 mounted on a Planewave Ascension 200 HR mount with a FLI PL6303E CCD camera.  I processed the downloaded calibrated sub-exposures in CCD Stack2 with further processing in Photoshop CS5 and Topaz Labs Denoise and Sharpen. Thanks for looking.

 Tim C

[drja...@aol.com]

Tim

That's a wonderful image.  Very well processed.  The sort of thing professional astronomers would have killed for 30 years ago.   Congratulations.

James 

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[Kevin Phillips]

That's amazing image Tim.  It is very low in the UK. Not sure if it will ever get high enough to image it ourself. I don't know a lot about this target I know William Herschel discovered it. Anyhow great image colours are amazing good. 

Kevin

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From: 'drja...@aol.com' via croydonastro <croydo...@googlegroups.com>
Sent: Saturday, May 3, 2025 3:12:01 PM
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Subject: Re: [croydonastro - 8084] NGC 2170 Angel Nebula

 

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[tcos...@gmail.com]

Thanks very much Kevin and James for your kind comments. Very much appreciated. This nebula is probably too low to image from the UK which is why I use iTelescope equipment for equatorial and southern hemisphere targets. Am currently imaging M83 (the Southern Pinwheel Galaxy) from Siding Spring Observatory in Australia and attached a single 5 minute unprocessed luminance sub-exposure, to illustrate how good the skies are there. It’s not cheap but the dark skies and v good equipment mean I can get away with shorter imaging times than I can  do at home in Oxted.

Tim C

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[Trev S]

That's an incredible image Tim. NGC2170 should be visible in wintertime here in the UK, have you ever tried to image it from here?

[William Bottaci]

Hello Tim, a nicely processed image.
Rich in features for image editing/processing, which of course is an important part of the whole process. So you get to choose the filters, binning, exposure; are you allowed any calibration frames to control the image noise? I would think that would be time consuming and they may deem not good production given there's a queue and scheduling.

Also wondering if the camera is cooled in any way.
There's a lot going on in the object, and it looks like it's still in its infancy as a star birth region.
I'm estimating the image field is about 45' square.
Well done and thanks for sharing.

William

[tcos...@gmail.com]

Thanks for your kind comments William and Trev.

@Trev – re whether I have imaged this object from the UK – the short answer is no! It only ever gets quite low down in the sky (32 degrees) in January from where I live, so even if it was clear etc the image quality would not be very good.  This is the main reason why I rent time with iTelescope as they have good kit in the southern hemisphere which is better located to imaging this sort of target.

 

@ William re calibration frames – you get the choice of using ready-calibrated images or you can download the uncalibrated images and do the calibration yourself. ITelescope take regular flats and darks etc so usually the ready-calibrated frames are fine – I use these to save time. The Finger Lake Instruments Proline CCD mono camera is cooled. One issue I have noticed in using iTelescope is that the rotation angle of the CCD chip is fixed for all users (tbh it has to be because of the need to take standardised darks and flats etc). This can sometimes lead to problems framing an object and image composition if using a CCD chip with a rectangular fov. As a result, I quite often choose a telescope and CCD combination with a square fov where image composition issues arising from rotation angle is less of a problem.

Best wishes and thanks once again.

Tim C

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