Coloring Up the Countryside

Spring is in full bloom. To celebrate 5+ years in Tsukahara, we decided to add some color in the yard. The flower baskets are an inexpensive way to brighten things up. Handsman and Gooday have a huge selection of flowers on sale right now. The baskets were purchased at Daiso (100 yen shop). It only takes a few minutes to put a flower basket together and it should provide color until autumn. Of course, the deer have other ideas…well, I’ll enjoy them while I can.

Crab Nebula

The Crab Nebula is the remains of an exploded star. The star exploded almost a thousand years ago (1054). The explosion was bright enough to be viewed during the day for 23 days according to Space.com . It is popular target for astrophotographers. The total imaging time is 20 hours in HaRGB. Preprocessing was done in CCDStack2 and post processing in PixInsight. Image processing has been challenging. PixInsight offers so many options which provides solutions as well as problems. I’m slowly climbing the learning curve. In this image, I wanted to focus on star color and detail in the nebula. Stay tuned for more images.


Update: This is an image of the Crab that is the current APOD. It's a collection of photos from Hubble, Spitzer, and an array of other devices used to detect radio waves, infrared, ultraviolet, etc. If you look closely at the center of the nebula, the pulsar is visible. For more information on that check out this link  https://apod.nasa.gov/apod/astropix.html

Update: Check out this 10 year time lapse movie of the Crab Nebula expanding. It's the most incredible thing I've ever seen!! https://www.astrobin.com/full/327338/0/