NP127is: Imaging the Skies Over Taos, NM

We’ve noticed some nice full-color and RGB  deep-sky images made by Jerry Macon using our Tele Vue-NP127is telescope. They’re all taken from his private Dark Star Observatory in Taos, New Mexico.  His image of the expansive North America Nebula (NGC 7000 – above) displays how the deep red light of Hydrogen-α dominates this emission nebula (an  ionized cloud of hydrogen gas about 3° across). A feature of this nebula is the “Cygnus Wall” section at the bottom, that includes “Mexico” and “Central America.” This feature is a dense star-forming region of dust and gas that is often imaged alone without the rest of the nebula. 

The Iris nebula (NGC-7023) is named after the flower. Brownish knotty “clouds” contrast with a striking central splash of blue. The juxtaposition of colors arises from the following natural phenomena: the brown color comes from dust glowing red from ultraviolet radiation and the blue color is dust reflecting light from a nearby star. 

The image processing of the red, green, and blue sub-frames of the  Sunflower galaxy above, resulted in a unique color shot of this spiral galaxy: one with an iridescent glow. In this colorful galaxy shot, older stars in the core glow yellowish while young giant stars glow blue. Star forming regions in the arms show as pink. 

The Eagle Nebula (M16 or NGC-6611) is a diffuse emission nebula and open cluster with several active star-forming regions. Gases in the nebula glow when  ionized by ultraviolet light from nearby young stars. The red color comes from the glow of hydrogen that is prevalent in the nebula. 

Gyulbudaghian’s Variable Nebula (GM 1-29) is a nebula that appears to change shape and brightness over a span of months. It is visible toward the top of the photo, in the tip of the brownish cloud below the brightest star (see close-up of that area below).

When most visible, it appears as a bright, fan shaped structure to the side of Young Stellar Object (young or protostar) PV Cephei. The area around this star is designated as a Herbig–Haro object formed by jets of gas ejected by the star along its rotational axis that collides with nearby clouds of gas. We only see the effect of the northern jet as the southern jet is obscured by material from our point of view. The northern jet carves out a shell within the surrounding gas that PV Cephei illuminates. Because it is a variable star, the amount of illumination and visibility of the dust in the hollow shell changes over time. Blue light is most easily reflected by the dust in the shell and that gives the nebula its predominant color.

LBN 468 is the triangular area of dark twisty knots in the rest of the image below Gyulbudaghian’s Nebula.

Tele Vue-NP127is

 

This 5″, fast f/5.2 scope is a Nagler-Petzval APO refractor (4-elements in 2-groups) based on our heritage of making exemplary wide field and planetary visual scopes. This scope comes with added features to make imaging easier and more flexible: it has a large 2.4″ rear aperture to cover 50-mm diagonal chips and a lockable tilting end-ring to compensate for any tilt induced by the accessory train. The included FocusMate dual-speed 10:1 focuser allows for fine-focus and accepts the optional motorized FDF-2004 Focusmate Driver for vibration-free, variable-speed, electronic motor control. For automated focusing, it is compatible with Starlight Instruments Focus Boss II system.

 

Sky & Telescope’s review of this versitile photo/visual scope raves that, “if you expect better from a 5-inch, f/5 refractor, you probably haven’t been living on this planet.” They also reported “no focus shift when switching between standard red, green, and blue filters used for conventional tricolor imaging — a tribute to the TV-NP127is’s superb color correction.”

 

The focuser is built to carry 12-lbs / 5.4-kg of payload, so it can handle most any filter-wheel / camera combinations or the heaviest Tele Vue eyepiece with ease. With a 4° maximum visual field of view, using our optional 55mm Plössl or 41mm Panoptic, this scope can act as its own finder. The OTA has a captive, sliding, metal dew shield and screw-on metal lens cover.  It comes in a custom designed hard-shell carry case with room for all standard accessories.

 

“There’s no such thing as an all-purpose optical system for astrophotography, but if you’re looking for a 5-inch f/5.2 refractor that can cover today’s 37-mm-square CCDs, then you’ll be hard pressed to do better than the TV-NP127is,” is how Sky & Telescope concluded their review.

 

We’ve noted that the speaker list for the Central European Deepsky Imaging Conference, March 15-17 2019 in Linz, Austria, has several talks by people that have published images using Tele Vue equipment. We list them here.

• Fabian Neyer will speak on Exploring the Limits – Digging Out Faint Structures in Astrophotographs. This Tele Vue-N101is owner wrote us a letter speaking of the “superb” color correction of the scope. This letters is posted on our website along with the photos he took through it.

• Oleg Bryzgalov will be speaking on Image acquisition and processing using low budget setups. He uses a Tele Vue Paracorr Type-2 on a fast 10″ Newtonian for imaging. We profiled him on our blog where his description of the Paracorr includes having excellent coma correction and no spherical aberrations.

• Bernhard Hubl will be speaking on ObjectTracker – a new planning tool for astrophotographers. He maintains a Tele Vue-NP101 page with images that span a decade.

• Wolfgang Promper will be speaking on KL4040 Best Practices and Images. He was an early user of our Tele Vue-NP127fli and you can see the images he took with that scope on our website.

• Jerry’s AstroBin page
• Find more Tele Vue-NP127is imager posts on this blog
• Tele Vue-NP127is page on our website (mobile version)
• Blog on our large scope visual accessory packages

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