Antares from a dark sky site.
This bright supergiant star lies in the constellation of Scorpius , my challenge was to try and capture the surrounding nebulosity around it.
I drove about 60 miles to the Gower peninsula and stayed near Oxwich bay and set up my equipment. The sky conditions were very clear and very windy with stars visible down to about magnitude 6.3. Looking towards the east you could clearly see the light pollution from Swansea however look to the south the sky was beautiful.
I was using a Vixen DX mount, An Atik 383L mono CCD camera , a set of Astronomik RGB filters with a H Alpha filter and a 135mm f/2.4 lens.
I attached the filters to the front of the camera lens and captured one and two minute subframes . I then combined the data with matching dark frames and flat field frames to reduce the effect of noise and vignetting in the final image.
The total exposure times were 25 minutes using a H Alpha filter, 20 minutes using a red filter, 30 minute using a green filter and 30 minutes using a blue filter.
Antares and surrounding nebulosity
