Sunday 17 February 2019

The Horsehead and Bubble nebulae

This image of the Horse head is a composition of two images taken through two different telescopes. An 80mm refractor and a 105mm refractor. I was using narrowband filters combined with RGB filters. This image has a total exposure time of twenty hours.


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This image of the bubble nebula in Cassiopeia is a composition of new and old data. The old data have an extra two hours of H-alpha luminance making it a total exposure time of five hours.


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Cropped image


Saturday 16 February 2019

M78 and Barnards loop

This image was taken on two separate evenings. On the first evening I only had two hours of imaging time before the clouds closed in on me. I set the camera on times two bin mode increasing the sensitivity of the camera. I used my set of narrowband filters H-alpha for 60 minutes, S11 for 30 minutes and O111 for 30 minutes . On the second evening however I set the camera on times 1 bin mode with a total exposure time of three hours using a H-alpha filter. That particular evening I was imaging about 30 degrees from the first quarter moon with mist to content with . Stars were only visible down to magnitude 3.5. The telescope I was using was an 80mm f/7 refractor with a focal reducer and field flattener making f/6.3 . I was using an Atik 383L mono CCD camera, PHD auto guiding and a Vixen Atlux mount. I captured ten-minute sub frames with matching dark-frames and combined them with flat-field frames to reduce the effect of vignetting in the final image. The total exposure time was five hours.

RGB


Hubble palette

RGB + Hubble palette

Thursday 14 February 2019

Combining images from 3 telescopes

I have combined three images together taken using three different telescopes: A ten inch reflector, A 4 inch refactor and a 3 inch refractor.
Notice how deep the image is. This images were captured using a full set of Astronomick RGB and narrowband filters. The sub-frames ranged from one minute , five minutes and ten minutes, with matching dark frames and flat field frames. The total exposure time was 24 hours and 40 minutes.

3 scopes narrowband luminance, RGB colour


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3 scopes narrowband


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Thursday 7 February 2019

The Sword of Orion.

I took this image on three seperate evenings under clear, moonless sky conditions. However I still had inner city lightpollution to contend with; stars visible down to magnitude five. The telescope was my 80mm f/7 refractor with a focal reducer and field flattener making f/6.3. I was also using a Vixen Atlux mount PHD auto-guiding and a set of Astronomik filters. I captured ten minute sub-frames with matching dark frames and combined them with flat field frames to reduce the effect of vignetting in the final image. The total exposure times were 5 hours using a H-alpha filter, one hour using an Olll filter, one hour using an Sll filter and one hour for each RGB filter; making a total exposure time of ten hours.

RGB Colour


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Bi-Colour, H-alpha and Olll


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Narrowband, H-alpha, Sll and Olll


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RGB and Narrowband colour


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Unsharp masked RGB Narrowband


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Saturday 2 February 2019

B33

These images of the Horsehead nebula were taken on five seperate evenings. The exposure times were 9 hours using an Astronomik H-alpha filter, 2 hours using an Olll filter, 2 hours using a Sll filter and
two, 30 minute exposures using green and blue filters. I captured ten-minute sub frames with matching dark frames and combined them with flat-field frames to reduce the effect of vignetting in the final image. The telescope I was using was an 80mm f/7 refractor with a focal reducer and field flattener making f/6.3. I was using an Atik 383L mono CCD camera, PHD auto guiding and a Vixen Atlux mount. I consider this part of the night sky very challenging from inner city light pollution . Notice that I have managed to reveal clouds of nebulosity in the fainter regions. The total exposure time was 14
hours.

RGB colour


Hubble Palette

RGB colour narrowband luminance

Narrowband luminance with narrowband RGB colour