Friday, January 28, 2011

Horsehead & Flame Nebulas


Here is my Horsehead shot from last night. It is nowhere near what I wanted but a big improvement from my last attempt last year. It's about 48 minutes of data but I was shooting for about two hours or so. The problem was that my guiding camera came into contact with my controller mount without me realizing it, and I couldn't figure out (for about 45 mins) why I was seeing error messages with my PHD guiding software. I thought it was software-based but realized too late that it wasn't! Oh well. I wanted to go out again tonight but there are some high level clouds loitering around the area.
  • 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 * 12 minute lights
  • ISO 400
  • Aligned and Stacked in Deep Sky Stacker
  • Post-Processing in GIMP (contrast, saturation and unsharp mask)

4 comments:

Anonymous said...

Spectacular!

Roberto said...

Hi Phil! It's a beautiful picture! I really love it. Congratulations. Great job!

cheers
Rober

Phil said...

Thanks a lot, everyone! Would love to see more red here but it could be local light pollution hindering my attempts in that regard.

Cheers!

RoryG said...

How did I miss seeing this until now? This looks great!