The PacMan Nebula (GiffS)

Celestial hemisphere: Northern · Constellation: Cassiopeia (Cas) · Contains: IC 1590 · NGC 281

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The PacMan Nebula

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The PacMan Nebula

Another one target all night project, this time the PacMan Nebula. A little more focal length would be good for this object but the data is good so an aggressive crop is well tolerated. The seeing on this night started off excellent. As usual when I am imaging all night I keep waking briefly to check the sky. In the wee hours I noticed what I thought were clouds building in. I wasn't sure what time it was but thought that I was going to lose 3 or more of my planned 9 hours of data collection. Next time I opened my eyes I realized that there was a heavy fog forming so I jumped up to find my ASIAIR App had at some point lost connection and was displaying a "can't re-connect error" message that would not clear. I had to force quit the app. Now it looked like I would lose much more than half the night but I needed to get my equipment in quickly so I couldn't investigate.

I got everything in and the between the dew heaters and the electronics that were running the moisture wasn't too bad but still wet enough to cause concern. I let everything dry for several hours and then fired up the ASIAIR and the App. Thankfully everything started and connected normally. I checked the log file and it showed that the ASIAIR was manually shutdown shortly after midnight. Weird because no way that happened. Also there was no log entry for the connection loss. What's weirder is that the data files were all there, all 108 of them! The last six were unusable due to light conditions and fog but I ended up with 102 subs to stack for 8+ hours of data. Clearly the timing of my wakeful eye was much closer to morning than I realized. Still have no idea what happened to the ASIAIR AutoRun program and that bugs the heck out of me.

Please note: The following tables are updated every 24 hours.

Distribution of astrophotographers

This table shows the number of distinct astrophotographers who have been assigned and IOTD/TP award compared to the total number of images awarded.
	Distinct awarded users	Total awarded images
Image of the day
Top picks
Top pick nominations

Distribution of subject types

This table shows the distribution of awards per subject type, compared to the popularity of images of that subject type.
	Image of the day	Top pick	Top pick nominations	Total submitted
Deep sky
Solar system
Extremely wide field
Star trails
Northern lights
Noctilucent clouds
Landscape

Distribution of data sources

This table shows the distribution of awards per data source, compared to the popularity of images acquired from that data source.
	Image of the day	Top pick	Top pick nominations	Total submitted
Backyard
Traveller
Own remote observatory
Amateur hosting facility
Public amaeteur data
Professional, scientific grade data
Mix of multiple sources
Other
Unknown

The “AstroBin Image of the Day and Top Picks”, or IOTD/TP, is a long-running system to promote beautiful, interesting, peculiar, or otherwise amazing astrophotographs, with a focus on technical excellence. Learn more.

Submitted The date and time when you submitted this image for IOTD/TP consideration.	...
Views by Submitters (available since September 19th, 2023) Every image is assigned to 50% of available Submitters. In the event that at least 80% of them don't view the image before its time in the IOTD/TP process expires, it's assigned to the other 50% of Submitters and the process begins anew.
Promotions by Submitters When 3 distinct Submitters promote the image, it moves on to the next stage of the process: evaluation for Top Pick status. This requirement, in addition to anonymization of images and distribution to only a subset of them, prevents biases and ensures that the best images are selected.
Promotions by Reviewers When 3 distinct Reviewers promote the image, it moves on to the next stage of the process: evaluation for IOTD status.
Early dismissal Staff members have a lot of images to inspect on a daily basis, and they can dismiss images if they believe they don't meet the requirements for IOTD/TP selection. If an image is dismissed 5 times, it's removed from the process. This streamlines the process and ensures that any bias present in promotions could be overruled by other staff members.

Status	Basic success
Started	...
Astrometry.net job	8548961
PixInsight job	n/a
PixInsight queue size	n/a
PixInsight stage	n/a

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The PacMan Nebula

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The PacMan Nebula

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