What an era to be alive!!!

On July 12th, 2022 we witnessed history being made.

A telescope that took decades to build and send to outer space created its 1st images putting another milestone on the unveiling beauties of the heavens and understanding of the early universe. One of the four images revealed was a very special star-forming region. It is a portion of an emission nebula, NGC 3324, within the famous Carina Nebula. Carina Nebula is one of the brightest and largest complex areas of bright and dark nebulosity in the constellation Carina. It is located in the Carina-Sagittarius Arm of the Milkyway Galaxy and is approximately 8,500 light-years from Earth. A part of the Carina Nebula, NGC 3324, is an open star cluster closely associated with an emission nebula where new stars are born. The stellar winds from these newly born extremely energetic stars ionize the atoms around and make them glow in different colors. The stellar winds also create the rim-like region in the western section of the nebula where the Hubble Space Telescope is observed in detail, the same section was one of the 1st observations of the James Webb Telescope for comparison.

What is even more mind-blowing is we can observe and take photos of the same regions from ground-based telescopes. The difference between a ground-based telescope and a telescope in space is extremely huge. On the surface of our planet when we do observations and astrophotography, we have to deal with a thick atmosphere and the turbulences in different layers of this atmosphere.

The so-called atmospheric effect is a pain for ground-based telescopes. It requires special hardware and special software to overcome these effects. Thanks to cutting-edge technology, big scientific ground-based telescopes have adaptive optics that can fix the atmospheric effect. By changing the physical geometry of the telescope mirror, we can adapt and ignore the atmospheric effect/distortion on the final image.

For astrophotography and amateur astronomy, adaptive optics hardware and/or software are prohibitively expensive. For this reason, we astrophotographers deal with the atmospheric effect differently by using a process called “Deconvolution”.

Deconvolution is a tedious process of reverse engineering the “blurring” effect of the atmosphere. The imperfections (blurring or in other words convolution) are inferred from a “point spread function” – a mathematical description of the blurring, which can be determined from stars in the image. “Deconvolution” needs rigorous work and may take well some hours to reduce the atmospheric effect/blurring in a very subtle but effective way.

This image of the NGC 3324 star cluster and emission nebula was shot in Chilean Andes at an elevation of 1525 m from the sea level with a 24” mirrored telescope that doesn't have the adaptive optics system to reduce the atmospheric effect/blurring.

Having achieved imaging the objects on ground based telescopes and equipment that can also be imaged by multi-million, billion dollars equipment is a remarkable achievement. Working to process those images gives you nothing but shivers and goosebumps.

Equipment & Exif Planewave CDK24 Telescope Aperture: 610 mm (24 inches) Focal Length: 3962 mm F-ratio: 6.5 Mount: Mathis MI-1000/1250 with absolute encoders Camera: FLI PL 9000 Filters(50mm square): Ha (3nm), OIII (3nm) Off-Axis guider: Astrodon MonsterMOAG Guiding camera: Starlight Xpress Ultrastar Observatory name: El Sauce Observatory Location: Río Hurtado, Coquimbo Region, Chile Total 13 Hours Integration SII 25 x 600 seconds Ha 26 x 600 seconds OIII 25 x 600 seconds

1/1 Edition Artist: Mustafa Aydın Image Credits: Mustafa Aydın / Telescope Live