The Spaghetti nebula

The following two images of the Spaghetti nebula are compositions of data taken using a 135mm lens and a 80mm f/6.3 refractor.

Hubble palette

Simens 147, The Spaghetti Nebula.

Simens 147, The Spaghetti Nebula.

This large patch of nebulosity lies in the constellation of Taurus the bull.

Taken using a 135 mm lens with a set of Astronomik filters  attached in front, S11, HA, O111 and blue. The camera was an Atik 383L mono CCD camera piggybacked on a 10 inch reflector mounted on a Vixen Atlux mount. I captured 3 minute sub frames with matching dark frames and combined them with flat field frames to reduce the effect of noise and vignetting in the final image. 

The total exposure time was 25 minutes using an S11 filter, 30 minutes using an O111 filter, 72 minutes using a H Alpha filter and 10 minutes using a blue filter.

Hubble palette + RGB

Hubble Palette

RGB

RGB cropped

The Milky Way

In late September 2025 I drove my camper van to Roch in western Pembrokeshire. There was no moonlight and very little light pollution. The sky conditions were very clear with stars visible down to about magnitude 6.7.

I was using a Canon EOS 50D DSLR camera mounted on a Ioptron SkyTracker Pro mount. The camera was set on ISO 3200 with 30 second sub frames and matching 30 second dark frames to reduce the effect of noise in the final images.

The following images are a composition of four 30 second exposures averaged together.