Saturday, December 04, 2010

Sword of Orion with D7000



Despite my better judgment, I did some imaging late last night in gusting winds. To be honest, my CGEM mount handled things quite well until the winds really picked up. Anyway, I love imaging the Sword of Orion region and have been patiently waiting for it to rise high enough so I can try imaging it with the D7000. The result is very nice. I need to learn how to layer shorter exposures so that the core isn't as burnt out. I'll start researching that soon - it's probably really simple. The megapixal size of the D7000 allows me to produce nice, clean, larger images than my D40.

Image Details
  • Imaging Scope: Astrotelescopes 80mm ED Refractor
  • Imaging Camera: Nikon D7000
  • Guiding Scope: William Optics 66mm Petzval Refractor
  • Guiding Camera: Meade DSI-C
  • Mount: Celestron CGEM
  • Exposures: 4 * 5 minute lights
  • ISO 500
  • Aligned and Stacked in Deep Sky Stacker
  • Post-Processing in GIMP (contrast, saturation and unsharp mask)

4 comments:

Polaris B said...

That's excellent, Phil! Very nice. Nicely framed, and the core just looks brighter than the rest. Excellent capture. Looks like you'll have fun with the camera. I had a hard time getting that much blue in the image with a DSLR. It's a much more pleasing presentation than the red my DSLR tends toward.

Phil said...

Thanks, mate! I have a feeling my optics might have more to do with with the blues in my image as opposed to the D7000. Most pictures I take through my ED80 seem to have blues come out really easy, sometimes to a point of annoyance. I need to find an object that doesn't have many blues in it to test this.

RoryG said...

Nice work, Phil! This is a fun object to work with, as it presents a number of different processing challenges. I wrote up a tutorial on using layer masks to combine multiple exposure lengths of the Sword of Orion using GIMP. I can put it on my site if you're interested.

Phil said...

Hi Rory. Yes, would be very interested to see those instructions. While I messed with it some last night, I think I can do a better job. I appreciate that!
Cheers.