At the end of the first clear night I had for weeks, I managed to image Orion Nebula for the first time this year. In total, I managed to get about an hour and three quarters of broadband data using 10 second and 30 second subs. I intend to get many more hours on this target over the winter in both broadband and narrowband so expect to see this appear here more often. For now, here’s the first cut
It’s been cloudy here in UK for weeks so I was lucky enough to get two clear nights in a row. I managed to get ~9.5hrs of data on Soul Nebula using my narrow band filter and 1hr RGB data with just a IR Cut filter. I’ve never imaged this target before so I wasn’t sure what to expect. It looks like this nebula puts out mostly Ha which makes it appear very red. This was also the first time I’ve mixed RGB and narrowband data in the same image so I’m still perfecting my technique for doing this. I did noticed that the RGB data reduced the dark noise dramatically and made the stars look very much better.
I noticed a target appear at the bottom of my garden that I’ve never seen before. It’s the Monkey Head Nebula. It was quite an easy target so I caught a few hours on it for several nights until I gathered enough to give a clean image. I ended up combining narrowband data with RGB data taken with only an IR filter for this image. This improves both the star quality and the background noise massively.
I was lucky enough to have a second clear night in a row and I intended to collect more photons from Pleiades but it hadn’t risen when I started my session. So, I decided to image Andromeda Galaxy instead. I’d never got a satisfactory result from this target in the past so I thought I’d get a few hours on it. A few hours turned into 4hrs and I never did switch back to Pleiades. Andromeda is harder to process than it is to capture, and I’m not entirely sure I’m happy with the result, but it’s a million times better than I’ve achieved in the past
This target was one of the first that I ever tried to image in 2021. My first attempt was really bad so I thought I’d have to remedy that. This is the result of almost 3hrs of data. No filters other than the IR cut.
