Animation Pulsar du Crabe (PSR B0531+21)

[JOKO]

Bonjour,

Je ne suis pas l'auteur mais je partage cette animation du Pulsar du Crabe (PSR B0531+21) faite il y a quelques jours en Allemagne par Martin Fiedler avec un oculaire OVNI-M (destiné à l'observation visuelle).

Sur son Dobson de 600mm F/3,3 il a imagé avec une caméra QHY174M GPS.

Animation, photo et détails ci-dessous.

 

 

Les conditions étant loin d'être parfaites. 

 

Le montage réalisé.

 

« After many cloudy weeks a usable starry sky showed up here in Radebeul (Germany) again, I used the opportunity and started another attempt to finally resolve the pulsar in M1 temporally and spatially. After the first experiments some weeks before it was clear that this faint part cannot be resolved directly in time even with a night vision device (OVNI-M), at least not with our astronomical conditions and with the for such a thing rather "small" 24" Dobsonian. But then I had an idea to crack the thing after all. According to my research on the pulsar, it has two maxima in the 33.5ms of its period, one bright and one fainter, both lasting about 5ms. This results in the minimum necessary exposure time (5ms). In addition, the pulsar is very close to another star and must be spatially resolved accordingly. So I extended the focal length, which also helps to recognize the pulsar, because the high background brightness due to the nebula is reduced.

 

On a 5ms frame you can't recognize stars with 15 or 16 mag even with a cooled CMOS camera + NVD, for that the noise too high. The only option, as is often the case, is to stack enough images to get the faint pulsar out of the noise. That's when I had the idea to use our QHY-174M-GPS camera, which is actually there to measure star occultations by asteroids and can set an accurate GPS time stamp. With this, one could assign to each frame its exact location in the period of the pulsar, and then stack them precisely. For this purpose I equipped the telescope with the Baader-FFC, the OVNI-M NVD without lens/eyepiece and the QHY camera with a 50mm f/1.4 lens. But this construction was too much for the focuser and I had to fight with image field tilts. But in the end I accepted it, there is no other way. The NVD was running at maximum gain and also the camera was at the limit with the gain but cooled down to -40°C.

 

I made many video sequences and tried a little bit, here is an example video: https://www.dropbox...._Video.avi?dl=0 The video has 3035 frames and was recorded for about 15s. Unfortunately the tracking is already so inaccurate in this short time that you need a star for stacking, so I took the brighter star at the bottom still in the field of view. If you look at the video, you can see just three stars in total. But the recording was the easier part in the end.

Then I had to get the timestamp from the single images, rounded appropriately, into the file name. For this I searched for a long time for a useful OCR software. It would be easier if the SharpCap would do it right away (somehow I couldn't manage that). Then I built an Excel table and took the timestamp of the first image as the beginning of the period. Then you need the exact period of the pulsar (0,033781965), which changes every year, I didn't know that before. Now I always add the full frequency to the first timestamp for the complete recording period. This resulted in the end in a column with nearly 500 values (times) in my case. Then you have to do the same for the remaining 33ms of the period (each new column +1ms). Then I built a program to find the frames matching the period time and copy them into the corresponding folders. In the end I had 34 folders with about 80 frames in each. I stacked them all manually in Fitswork, the flashing of the NVD makes an automatic detection of even the brightest star impossible. Since the star was also not clearly visible everywhere, I could usually only really use 50-60 images.

 

The chance that this really works out I had rather classified as low, it was completely unclear whether the time stamp of the camera is accurate enough and whether the OVNI-M can even resolve 5ms in time. But it really worked and in the animation you can see the main and the secondary maxima cleanly separated. The image quality is grotty but it worked With a bigger telescope, better seeing and less noise I'm sure it would work without stacking, but I don't have it. Nevertheless I am very satisfied and happy with the results The image with the arrow is a average image from all frames of the animation. By the averaging the pulsar is clearly fainter than the near comparison star even if it is actually brighter in the maximum.

 

Best

Martin »

 

Modifié 27 janvier 2021 par JOKO

[xs_man]

Magnifique performance !  Très impressionnant.

 

Albéric

[sebseacteam]

Sacré challenge.

Le big tube, l'escabeau pour accéder au PO, le tout les pieds dans la neige.

Chapeau 

[Alien]

Incroyable, je ne savais même pas que c'était observable 

[latrade24]

Salut,

Une performance hors du commun, un grand bravo.

[jgricourt]

M1 est une nébuleuse fascinante même si en visuel elle ne casse pas trois pattes à un canard mais avec les moyens de capture ultra sensibles dont ont dispose maintenant celle-ci révèle sa vraie nature.

 

Je me permets aussi en complément de poster quelques extraits des publications mémorables de XS_MAN que je considère comme étant LE photographe spécialiste de cette grande nébuleuse 😍

 

(2012) Image impressionnante il y a 10 ans déjà

M1 et son pulsar - Page 3 - Astrophotographie - Webastro

 

(2016) Image ultra détaillée de M1, Hubble est bon pour la casse ...

M1 encore plus fort : résolution + grand champ au T300 + QHY 174 M + QHY5III 290 M - Astrophotographie - Webastro

 

(2017) Les ondes de chocs en mouvement !

Evolution des ondes de choc du pulsar de M1 en 2 mois et demi - Page 3 - Astrophotographie - Webastro

 

(2018) La même vidéo mais par EXAXE cette fois ci

M1, un pulsar qui se voit! - Astrophotographie - Webastro

 

Enjoy !

 

[JOKO]

APOD !!!

Cette animation du pulsar est l'APOD du jour, réalisée à l'aide d'un oculaire de vision nocturne intensificateur OVNI-M.

Pour rappel une caméra QHY174M GPS a été utilisé pour prendre les poses à travers l'oculaire.

https://apod.nasa.gov/apod/ap210209.html

Modifié 9 février 2021 par JOKO

[Cello]

Impressionnant 

novice en Astro, j’ai observé pour la première fois M1 cette semaine 😀

jai lu sur Wikipedia (je n’ai pas d’autre source pour l’instant) l’histoire de ce corps céleste, hyper interessant ! Fascinant d’apprendre Que les chinois en 1054 ont observé l’explo De cette supernova .

 

je ne savais pas qu’on pouvait capter comme ça le signal du pulsar.

bravo