The heart of the universe

The heart nebula (IC1805) in the constellation Cassiopeia. Last night, it was a beautiful, clear night here at Harestua Solar Observatory outside of Oslo. Only problem was a storm on the western coast of Norway that had its effect even around these areas. The winds made guiding a challenge. With some peaks of more than a pixel on my guider. But all in all, I managed to collect 4 hours of exposures. This is the best I have ever managed to capture of this beautiful nebula. I will later attempt the twin nebula (Soul nebula).

Tech details : Pentax K5, ISO 400, 48x5min, William Optics FLT98 CF w/WO AFR-IV reducer/flattener (F/5). Stacked in DSS, processed in PS and IrfanView.

A sky full of stars

Last night there was a clear sky, so I wanted to do some astrophoto. At least for the hours the weather forecasters predicted would be clear. So I set up my scope and spent the better part of an hour setting up the polar alignment. I got it pretty good at the end. Then I set up the autoguider, and set the telescope for 3 hours of exposures on M27. When I came this morning to check on progress, I found my laptop had died due to lack of juice (I had actually forgotten to switch on the power from the outlet, so it ran on battery only...). And when I checked the camera, I had not pressed the plug in properly, so the last 10 or so exposures were obviously just due to a wiggly connection, so they varied between 1/33th of a second to 7 seconds. In total, I got 15 exposures of 5 minutes each. They had, on the other hand, very good guiding on them. Round, sharp stars. So, with only 1 hour 15 minutes of exposure. What can I do. Well. Not as much as I had hoped, but I did get something out of it. And I decided to upload almost the whole frame. I love the view of all the stars in the Milkyway. And then, M27 in the middle of the myriad of stars. The universe is truly beautiful!
Tech details : Pentax K5, ISO400, 15x5 minutes, William Optics FLT98 CF w/ WO AFR-IV flattener/reducer (F/5), on Celestron AVX mount. Guided with QHY5II & PHD2. Stacked in DSS, processed in PS and IrfanView.

Western veil

Last night, I finally had a clear night after a few weeks of overcast. Despite the half Moon only 90 degrees away, I wanted to give it a go. So I did 2.5 hours on the western parts of the Veil nebula. (I actually did 4.5 hours, but the temperature dropped so much during the night that the last 2 hours were out of focus...) After stacking the images in DSS, I noticed a strange effect that I was unable to remove. It only happened in green and blue. Red was mostly unaffected. So after a bit of trial and error, I gave up on trying to create a colour image. Although I managed to create one, it looked like something I didn't want to publish here. I will give it some more tries in the future. Using the red channel as luminance worked fairly well, but the colors were weird. So I'll see if I can make them better in the future. So for now, this is the red channel, as a luminance image in greyscale. (Click on image to get bigger version).

Tech details : Pentax K5, William Optics FLT98 CF w/ WO AFR-IV flattener/reducer (f/5), Astronomik CLS filter, Celestron AVX mount, guided using QHY 5II camera and PHD2 guiding sw. Stacked in DSS, processed in PS and Irfanview.

Edit : I made a color version. I checked the image above, and found that it looked like crap on a bigger screen. Sooo. Maybe I should do a better job before publishing my images here. The picture below is a first version in color. Not perfect. But I managed to remove much of the strange colors. Enjoy!