Nebula season is upon us so its time to start dusting off the equipment and honing our skills. Atmospheric conditions aren’t great with high temperatures, high humidity, some Saharan dust, and a non-trivial amount of wildfire smoke as we get every year. The Veil Nebula is a convenient target for me, being in the north …
Myth: You cannot image from inside cities because the light pollution will make things impossible. TL;DR: Modern software and filter technology is game-changing for imaging in the city, even for broadband targets! Long form: Let’s take a bit of a deep dive into this. For many, many years it has been accepted truth that you …
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I intended to do a comparison of a couple of different Light Pollution filters but the weather hasn’t exactly cooperated. All I’ve got so far is 3 hours of data on M27 with a Hutech IDAS LPS-D2, my newest filter. I want to compare that as closely as possible with the older LPS-P2 to see …
Jan 7/8, 2020Allen, Texas (Bortle 9)No LP filter (nuts!)60x 2 minutes (2 hours total integration time) William Optics RedCat51QHY 168C Cooled CMOS color cameraiOptron CEM60EC mount, unguided
Taken from my back yard in Allen, TX. Bortle 9 skies.
I finally got another monochrome camera after years of shooting color CCDs. I’m still re-learning the ropes, particularly using narrowband filters for very specific frequencies of light associated with ionized states of hydrogen, sulfur and oxygen. I’ll probably end up doing a lot of hydrogen and overlaying red, green and blue broadband filters over that …
Messier 27 1,300 Light Years away Image data collected over two nights on August 4th and 5th. A total of 6 hours of data, 73 exposures of 5 minutes collected on a QHY 8L CCD cooled to -15C. Scope is a Celestron EdgeHD @ f/10.
Seeing turbulence in the air) wasn’t great. Stars were twinkling away with the best of them which does compromise image quality fairly significantly. Still, I wanted to get M27 again since I re-calibrated the settings for my camera and learned a bit more about exactly how far is too far with a CCD. This is …
Shot through massive light pollution over staggeringly huge The Village At Fairview outdoor mall complex. This started as an add-on session to my first attempt at narrowband imaging and turned out much better than I hoped for. Of course this would be much more grand out in the country but that’s not what this site …
Barnard 33 – The Horsehead Nebula in Orion If you find Orion’s belt, the eastern most star is Alnitak. Just a bit South and West from that star is this region, cataloged by Edward Emerson Barnard in 1919 in his book of dark nebulae. This cloud of dust is #33 on his list so we …
Read more “Getting on the Narrowband wagon – Horsehead Nebula”