With the judges looking at the background, colour choice, star quality and clarity, Lenard Velensky‘s edit of Messier 8 data won for September 2021 in the SkyNews Astroimage Editing Contest.
Collected with The Royal Astronomical Society of Canada’s Robotic Telescope, entrants used the 12 hours of data (Hydrogen-alpha: 4 hours; Luminance: 4 hours; RGB: 4 hours) at one of three different levels of calibration to put together images of the nebula.
Velensky said he used the sub-exposures and calibration files from our “Level 3 – Advanced” folder and processed solely with PixInsight. Judges specifically noted the nice detail in Velensky’s nebula.
“The view of M8 is obscured from my backyard, so it is a nice bonus to have access to your data,” he wrote. “While I was unable to capture the nebula for myself I still enjoyed the fun and challenge of processing it.”
The contest
Located near Auberry, California, The RASC Robotic Telescope is a 16-inch, f/8.9 RCOS with a SBIG STX-16803 camera on a Paramount ME mount. It has seven filters: LRGB, Hydrogen-alpha, Oxygen III and Sulphur II. A Canon 6D — used to capture larger targets — is piggy-backed on the scope, sporting a 200mm f/2.8 lens.
To learn more about the contest or enter this month, click here.
The prize
Each month, SkyNews will be giving the winner a prize package that includes: access to RASC Robotic Telescope data for the year, as well as some essential stargazing tools — a one-year gift subscription to SkyNews (to use or to give to a friend), a SkyNews folding chair, a SkyNews backpack and a SkyNews red light keychain.
The value of the prize pack is about $200.
