Last night we had some visitors from Hingham Primary School at the observatory. During the evening the sky was steadily improving and they enjoyed some fine views of Jupiter.
Once they’d gone then I turned my attention to taking some pictures of the dark nebula B33 in Orion which was by now a good height from the horizon. I’ve said this before but it will bear repeating; if you want to take longer exposures on the 20″ wait until the target is rising in the East. Frame rotation is at it’s lowest, the telescope tracks and guides best in this direction and you’re going to be troubled less by car headlights.
I took 22 60 second exposures with the Atik camera, binned 1×1 and all were acceptable in terms of star shape.
3 replies on “The Horsehead”
That’s come out pretty well – imagine what it’d be like with a hydrogen alpha filter!
Thanks Bob
I might have another try with a red filter which should improve the contrast although I’ll probably have to bin the images to keep the ADU count high. Ha filters tend to reduce the stars dramatically.
Wow. That’s incredibly smooth. Very good. Got some faint misshapen stars to left but really perfect around the main dark nebula. Next step to add a bit of colour. Then flats, H alpha, etc..etc…!