Tarantula in HOO

A year and a half ago, a plan was made to send two setups under very dark skies to Namibia. After countless conversations, tinkering, planning, purchases, drilling, printing, assembling, connecting and testing, finally the first of the setups arrived at Hakos farm and was commissioned.

For me, the choice of target for first light was obvious — Tarantula. It is an object I had the chance to observe many years ago through a huge 70 cm telescope in the Atacama Desert in Chile.

The image was taken with an Epsilon 180ED, ASI 6200MM Pro camera, on an iOptron CEM70-EC2 mount, Antlia V-Pro filters together with Highspeed Ha and OIII, both 3 nm.

Tarantula itself is a very well-known object. It lies roughly 161 thousand light years from us in the Large Magellanic Cloud. At its centre is the star cluster NGC 2070, which produces most of the energy illuminating the region. I came across the interesting fact that if Tarantula were at the same distance from Earth as the Orion Nebula, it would cast a shadow at night.

This is the first image I have processed in the HOO palette.

The image above is heavily downscaled. The full-resolution version is available on Astrobin: https://app.astrobin.com/i/7bfhbh

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