1104yanis
The pulses of a neutron star
The Crab Nebula (M1) has a pulsar in its center that is at the origin of these filamentary structures. With its sweet name PSR B0531+21, the Crab Pulsar has a magnitude of 16 and is thus visible on long exposure times.
In addition, it has a frequency of about 34ms with two distinct pulsations in this period. It is therefore possible to detect its pulsations via the Lucky Imaging method thanks to shorter exposure times.
But here a first challenge appears. The pulsar is visually close to another star, which implies that it is necessary not only to resolve it temporarily but also spatially. In other words, very short exposure times and a large diameter were required.
One of the drawbacks of this technique was that it was necessary to find at least two stars clearly visible on the raw images in the field in order to perform the alignment and therefore all the processing. I therefore had to take images with a fairly large size in order to find two stars visible on 5ms exposures, generating about 2TB of data to process.
Then comes the longest part which consists in sorting all the images according to their position in the pulsar period in order to stack them together. I wrote a small python script to sort the 471000 images based on their timestamp. It took about 1 month of non-stop process for sorting, aligning and stacking.
This was by far the most complex and longest project I have done so far and I am proud to present the following animations.
On each of the stacks, we can barely see the nebulosity, so I mixed the original starless with a Halpha starless made with a 150/750 telescope for aesthetics (50/50).
Setup:
Skywacher flextube 400/1800 GOTO
Player One Poseidon M-Pro
~471000 x 5ms
Temp: -20°C
France, suburb of Paris
Bortle 8
The pulses of a neutron star
The Crab Nebula (M1) has a pulsar in its center that is at the origin of these filamentary structures. With its sweet name PSR B0531+21, the Crab Pulsar has a magnitude of 16 and is thus visible on long exposure times.
In addition, it has a frequency of about 34ms with two distinct pulsations in this period. It is therefore possible to detect its pulsations via the Lucky Imaging method thanks to shorter exposure times.
But here a first challenge appears. The pulsar is visually close to another star, which implies that it is necessary not only to resolve it temporarily but also spatially. In other words, very short exposure times and a large diameter were required.
One of the drawbacks of this technique was that it was necessary to find at least two stars clearly visible on the raw images in the field in order to perform the alignment and therefore all the processing. I therefore had to take images with a fairly large size in order to find two stars visible on 5ms exposures, generating about 2TB of data to process.
Then comes the longest part which consists in sorting all the images according to their position in the pulsar period in order to stack them together. I wrote a small python script to sort the 471000 images based on their timestamp. It took about 1 month of non-stop process for sorting, aligning and stacking.
This was by far the most complex and longest project I have done so far and I am proud to present the following animations.
On each of the stacks, we can barely see the nebulosity, so I mixed the original starless with a Halpha starless made with a 150/750 telescope for aesthetics (50/50).
Setup:
Skywacher flextube 400/1800 GOTO
Player One Poseidon M-Pro
~471000 x 5ms
Temp: -20°C
France, suburb of Paris
Bortle 8