The Great Orion Nebula

Last night I decided to take another stab at M42. After capturing my light frames, I started to change the battery and accidentally bumped the camera. There was no way for me to get back in exactly the same position. Discouraged, I only took a few dark frames since I did not think it would matter. This morning I processed them both with and without the darks. I also forgot to bring out my material to give my flat field frames. So not an optimal night, and I also have a sore throat this morning! Then I continue to be inexplicably drawn to this hobby, HA! Here is the result of both, the first without darks and the second with them.

Information for the photos:

8 inch Newtonian reflector mounted on an Atlas
unguided, approximately 11 frames at 15 second
approximately 40 frames at 30 seconds
unmodified rebel 6.8 megapixel version
baader 2 inch UV IR cut filter

Processed using deep sky stacker, pixinsight, and the gimp


Things to improve:

Get a coma corrector!
Get guiding to work!
Learn how the process image functions work better!
Be sure to accurately capture dark and flat frames!

December Full Moon

Here's a quick one. Full moon, December 2007.

Merry Christmas!

Here is a photo of my third attempt at Mars as well as a shot of the Moon. Hope everyone has a good Christmas!

finally a clear night!

Last night the sky finally cleared after weeks of cloudy weather and rain. With the closest approach of Mars upon us for the next 10 years, I wanted to try and grab some photos while I could. Using an off-the-shelf WebCam with my existing telescope and mount, I captured several short video clips and then used software to select the best frames and combine them into a single image. This is a new process for me so it took awhile to get everything working properly. This image is a composite of the images resulting from each of movies. The polar ice is clearly visible, as well as numerous albedo features. Mars is currently bright red and high in the sky by 10:00 p.m.



This image is a single frame of 30 seconds showing M42, commonly known as Orion Nebula. I snapped this with a DSLR at prime focus before putting everything up for the night. Later this winter I will be taking numerous photos of it so I wanted to get an idea of how well it filled the frame. This is one of the brightest nebulas in the night sky, and appears to hang in the middle of Orion's sword belt where a scabbard would be.



This image is a single frame of 4 1/2 minutes, unguided, showing the Flame Nebula in Orion's belt. Designated NGC 2024, it is much fainter than M42, appears next to Alnitak, the third star in the belt, which shines at magnitude 1.74 and lives 817 light-years away. The smudge in the upper right is a nebula, NGC 2023, surrounding a smaller bright star.



I could not resist snapping at least one image of the first quarter moon!

double cluster in Perseus

here's another image from this past weekend, this is the famous double cluster in Perseus, a pair of open star clusters.

new setup!

I finally have my telescope setup where I can take photographs directly through it. With my Canon Rebel set at prime focus, I can gather more light and reduce the time needed for my exposures. Here are a couple of examples using the new setup. The second image is the galaxy M33, also known as the Pinwheel Galaxy. It is a composite of 25 exposures of 30 seconds each.




The first image is the comet Holmes, currently about a second magnitude object in Perseus, easily visible with the naked eye. This comet is notable because it brightened unexpectedly over a millionfold in the past couple of weeks.

The North America Nebula

The last night provided another chance to image the North American nebula in Cygnus. This photo is my result, the first image I posted covered the same general area, although at a much smaller scale. (For all of you non geographers, smaller scale meaning a wider area) while this one is an improvement, I am still not terribly pleased with the result. Processing images stinks!

Color!

Here is another pic from this weekend. I have finally managed to find my color data. This image shows the Andromeda Galaxy also known as M31. To the upper left, the faint fuzzy is a companion Galaxy, and there is a second one directly to the right of the galactic core that looks more starlike. This object is visible to the naked eye, and appears as a faint smudge on the sky looking to the east around 9:30 p.m. between Cassiopeia and the great square of Pegasus.

First photo taken with the Atlas Mount

I finally had a chance to try some long exposure photography with the new mount. This is the only photo I could get before dew became a problem.

Photo taken with a canon rebel dslr with a 70-300 mm zoom lense set to 70 mm at f/5.6 at 800 ISO. Four exposures of approximately 90 seconds with three dark frames.

The area pictured is the Milky Way around the North America nebula. The brightest star is Deneb, in the constellation Cygnus, one of the three stars of the summer triangle.