ฯ-Ophiuchi Nebula Complex and friends.
Located at the meeting of Scorpio and Ophiuchus, this is arguably the most venomous part of the sky.
Let's look around.
Down the bottom we have Antares, a red supergiant, illuminating IC4606 - the Antares Nebula, and next to it the edge of the globular cluster M4.
Above M4 is a region illuminated by Al Niyat or Sigma Scorpii.
In between and above M4 and Antares is the tiny globular cluster NGC6144.
Directly above that is IC4603, and above that is the edge of what is recognised as IC6404, the ฯ-Ophiuchi nebula itself.
Lastly, almost directly above Antares is IC4605 - the Blue Angel nebula.
Shot with a #Dwarf3 from my back yard in suburban #PerthWA , post processed in Stellar Studio, #Snapseed , and #GooglePhotos . Total exposure 6:19, 60s subs at gain 80, Ha/OIII filter.
#Astronomy #Astrophotography #Astrodon #BackyardAstronomy #SouthernSky #Photography
Perth is delusional if it believes it's helpful and properly signposted.
Arriving at East Perth coach terminal yesterday, and having to go to the WACA for my connecting bus. East Perth being a gross generalisation of connecting services, apparently.
The signs available were espousing the wonder of transport maps, and wayfinder signboards. But, I was asking too much and there was no way to realise the 34 bus came nowhere near the station.
Me being super-capable, and the German backpacker being super-capable, meant we had planned plenty of time to work it out for ourselves. (Him going to Karratha). But, nowhere was there anyone saying: I will help. Or, even an accurate geographical map to expose discrepancies in the system.
And it's the little things that were causing issues. How do you pay on a Perth bus? Or, when they signpost station, what kind of station do they mean? Or, what if my device gives out and I don't have a backup information source? For sake of mind, just telling me where East Perth connecting buses actually run? (The answer was nowhere because they don't approach a terminal)
In the end I walked into the city to hitch a ride with family.
This is how every trip to Perth feels too. It's a unnecessarily difficult sprawling city that's designed for and by insiders. I haven't used a form of transport here that gives me satisfaction due to good planning. (Don't start me on the walking issues.)
At least the people I met along the way were nice people! 
While walking to the Good Food and Wine Festival down at #PCEC we saw this absolutely charming trompe-l'ลil on William St.
It continues down the road to the corner of St. George's Tce.
Over the last three nights - a break in the weather for us here in #Boorloo ( #PerthWA ) - I've been targeting the same target after midnight and through to astronomical twilight. It is another target that is familiar to me - #C63 or #HelixNebula sometimes known as the Eye of Sauron Nebula or the Eye of God Nebula.
This is the largest planetary nebula visible to us, only about 200 parsecs away, and is about 2.8 light years across, making it about 22 arcminutes across for the main body, and is about 6500 years old.
So back to the making of this image. Each night I got about five hours of shooting in with my #Dwarf3 , for about fifteen hours total. I had to ditch a bunch of frames as they had dodgy data (atmospheric distortions, musktrails, and, in one case, a passing jet), which brought me down to thirteen hours and thirty-six minutes (816x60s@80). These I restacked using the "Megastack" function of the #DwarfLab app (about 3 hours - executed entirely within the telescope), and then passed the result to the #StellarStudio part of the app (running in the cloud) to optimize the FITS file and run a star removal.
I then exported a PNG of each version, and started post-processing. This consisted of passing the starless image into #Snapseed and boosting the saturation, darkening shadows and so on. Then I took the optimized version and took the shadows to maximum darkness, and reduced the overall brightness somewhat, leaving me with a reduced star version, with almost no nebula visible. Lastly, in Snapseed again, I used the double exposure tool to stack the two parts together.
And here is the result.
WearyBonnie
rdm
chrismannolini
rood
