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!