I was lucky to get 3 clear nights here in UK. Again, guiding was going very well, so I spent two nights gathering narrowband data and one night grabbing RGB. I discovered that my sv220 filter can’t deal with Alnitak! That star is BRIGHT! Anyway, it’s nothing I can’t fix with the addition of some RGB star data. Anyway, I’m relatively pleased with this image and I’ll probably spend weeks “tweaking” it.
We had our first clear night here in UK for months, and it turned out to be the clearest night I can remember in the past year! I was guiding at 0.6-0.8” and I was able to take 10min exposures with and indicated ~2.0 HFR in NINA. To complete this wonderful evening, the wind was very low, the temperature was around 0c and there was no moon. We had a slight hiccup for ~45mins to wait for some cloud to clear, but other than that it was a wonderful evening. But what should I target? I wanted to get a decent Rosette Nebula before it disappeared below the horizon and I managed to get a really good 5hrs of data, mostly consisting of 5min subs although I did get some 10min subs as well. I also got some Jellyfish Nebula which I will save for another day. Anyway, the results are below. This is processed entirely in Siril with a few curves tweaks in Gimp
This is the Tadpoles Nebula, IC410. It’s a star forming region in the constellation of Auriga. It’s near to the Flaming Star Nebula, the Spider Nebula and the Fly Nebula. I imaged this over a week where the sky was reasonable clear but not perfect however very window. My guiding was not well at all. I think this is why it looks a little less sharp that I would like. Anyway, I’m reasonably happy with it for now.
This is the Elephants Trunk Nebula. I decided I wanted to make an attempt at getting this nebula before it disappeard over the horizon for this year. I’ve tried this before (see below) without much luck so I thought I’d try it again. I was somewhat lucky in that the evening was amazingly clear with fantastic seeing. I was able to maintain 0.5” guiding on an Az-GTI for hours on end which is nothing short of miraculous. Most of the data that I got here was taken with 10min subs. I’m quite happy with the results although I’m not sure I’ve got the most of this data yet, so perhaps expect a reprocess at some point.
This is the California Nebula. It’s a massive emission nebula in the constellation of Perseus. I gathered this data on a clear night with almost an entire full moon. The data I acquired on this was almost entirely Ha data and the OIII was virtually non-existant so I didn’t even bother to add it to the final image, hence the reason it’s so red. Anyway, I think it looks ok for a first attempt.
