The sun peeks out through mist and clouds right at sunrise. Taken from our Many Glacier Hotel 3rd floor balcony!
The Monkey Head Nebula (here shown with the small Sh2-247 object in the lower left) emits well in all 3 of the common NB filters. This was the first image with the new QHY268M after the light leak issue was fixed. This is from just over 15 hours of data, processed in modified SHO palette (toning down the green from the stronger Hα a little bit) to bring out some nice interacting colors of the signals as they mix together. In order to get the monkey head orientation correct and to include Sh2-247 (with my fixed sensor angle) this ended up as a vertical image... Some details from Wikipedia: NGC 2174 (also known as Monkey Head Nebula) is an H II[1] emission nebula located in the constellation Orion and is associated with the open star cluster NGC 2175.[1] It is thought to be located about 6,400 light-years away from Earth. The nebula may have formed through hierarchical collapse. Equipment: QHY268M Camera @ -10C and Gain:56 Offset:25 Software Bisque MyT Mount Stellarvue SVQ100 Astrograph Refractor, 580mm @ f/5.8 Antlia Pro Filters (3nm narrowband plus LRGB) Askar FMA180 Guidescope/ASI290MM Software: Pixinsight Commercial Version 1.8 Lightroom CC Photoshop CC N.I.N.A. Control Software Star XTerminator (Russell Croman) Noise XTerminator (Russell Croman) Light Frames: Ha - 56 x 300 secs ( 4 hrs 40 mins) OIII - 61 x 300 secs (5 hrs 05 mins) SII - 60 x 300 secs (5 hrs) Red: 30 x 15 secs (7 mins 30 secs) Green: 30 x 15 secs (7 mins 30 secs) Blue: 308 x 15 secs (7 mins 30 secs) 15 hrs 07 mins 30 secs total Dark Frames: 10 x 15 secs (2.5 mins) 10 x 300 secs (50 mins) Flat Frames: 10, each filter Bias Frames: 60
M42 at Prime Focus Went back and tried again for M42, this time using a Meade 8" SCT as my 'camera lens'. This shot is an HDR composite made from 3 individual 'stacks' of shots (processed using DeepSkyStacker), then post processed in Photoshop CS4 and then Photomatix, to try to mitigate the very high dynamic range of M42 4 x 6 min @ ISO 800 w/ f6.3 focal reducer 21 x 3 min @ ISO 800 w/ f6.3 focal reducer 5 x 1 min @ ISO 800 w/ f6.3 focal reducer 8 x 20 sec @ ISO 800 w/ f6.3 focal reducer 11 x 10 sec @ ISO 800 w/ f6.3 focal reducer There was additional post processing applied using Irfanview and Photoshop CS4 to the final HDR output. I am still learning about the post processing tricks, having gotten a lot of help form some friends on various forums. I may update this image in the future if I get another version I like more, but this one is not too bad for a beginner like me :o)
