Wednesday, April 27, 2011

Beehive Cluster


Well, the skies cleared up tonight but I should have stayed home. Firstly, I left my jack for my PC power cord at home, so couldn't guide. Secondly, even if I could have guided, the wind maintained very strong gusts through the night. I didn't want to leave without imaging something, so decided to shoot the Beehive. It was pretty bright and didn't really need long exposures, so shot several two-minute frames to stack. Above is the resulting image. Not bad, considering. I am going to try for this weekend if the conditions get better. The wind here is nuts, though - so persistent.

Imaging 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: 8 * 10 minute lights
  • ISO 640
  • Aligned and Stacked in Deep Sky Stacker
  • Post-Processing in GIMP (contrast, saturation and unsharp mask)
  • Noise Reduction in NeatImage

2 comments:

  1. Nice field of view on that. You've inspired me to go back and reprocess my M44.

    ReplyDelete
  2. This comment has been removed by the author.

    ReplyDelete

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