Category: Nebula

The autumn event at Kelling Heath has come and gone for another year. Friday evening was cloudy meaning I could catch up on some sleep. Saturday was partly cloudy, clearing for an hour and then it clouded over completely until early on the Sunday. I’d booked an extra night for the Sunday and this turned out to be the best night with clear skies from dusk until dawn.

As soon as it was dark enough I started taking pictures of Sh2-155 in Cepheus again as I want to complete the right hand side of the Cepheus mosaic. Once Orion was high enough I started a mosaic of the Witches Head and left CCD Commander taking images until dawn while I caught up on some more sleep.

When processing, I decided to try something different and followed a workflow tutorial on the Pixinsight website for dynamic range compression. This uses HDRMultiscale as usual but replaces the stars with ones generated using the masked stretch script.

The initial result is here. Next step will be to add in the remaining data from Saturday evening and then combine the frames into the Cepheus mosaic.

While at Haw Wood Farm I took advantage of the clear, dark southern sky to take some pictures of Aquila. Just to the west of Tarazed is a black sooty smudge against the bright stars of the Milky Way.

Last night was forecast clear from dusk until dawn and I had a camera to test. A replacement fan arrived on Friday and was fitted on Saturday. Camera body vibration was eliminated.

Some short test exposures on the mount confirmed that the trailing was gone so while I was waiting for the moon to set I took some 10 minute exposures of NGC 7000.

After the hottest day of the year Thursday evening was forecast to be clear all night and it didn’t disappoint. As I had to work on Friday I set the telescope up, left it imaging and went to bed. Got up at 1:30 for a meridian flip and returned to bed, rising at 4 to the sound of the guider alarm. It had lost the guide star in the glare of pre-dawn. All in all, 4 hours worth of 10 minute exposures were gathered.

After processing in Pixinsight, here is the result.

The field of view is about 3 degrees wide and is an uncropped frame from the Zenithstar 70 with WO focal reducer/flattener.

The Veil is the remains of a supernova star explosion some 5000 years ago. At it’s distance of 1500 light years it now spans 70 light years and it’s still expanding.

By the time I’d captured a few images of M39 it was dark enough to try NGC6888, The Crescent Nebula, also in Cygnus. With a darker sky background I opted for 10 minute exposures and started at about midnight. 9 images, plus 25 flat frames later I called it a night.

Processing is entirely in PixInsight; after 6 months with this program I’m starting to get more comfortable with it, still lots to learn though and a course with Ian King later this month should hopefully help.

This picture overlaps in one corner with my earlier image  of Sadr. I shall have to try stitching them together as a mosaic.

This is an area I’ve imaged before using the Canon 350D, Zenithstar 70 and Astrotrac but this time it’s with the QHY9 mounted on the Avalon. Last night was clear after dark and after spending some time fine tuning the guiding I set the camera recording 10 minute frames and retired to the warmth and comfort of the sofa. Emerging at 1:30 it was just starting to cloud over so I terminated the sequence and took 20 flat frames using my light panel.
A dynamic Background Extraction routine in PixInsight removed most of the unsightly light pollution on the left of earlier versions of this image. I’ve also made the image a lot lighter to show more of the faint nebulosity and removed the star spikes.

Despite the stiff breeze, the guiding worked extremely well with Maxim reporting star roundness figures of around 0.05 which is better than I’ve seen using any equipment previously.