The Horsehead

One of the most iconic nebulas in the sky is the Horsehead nebula in the Orion constellation. It is a dark nebula that obscures the light from the red hydrogen nebula behind it. I wanted to do a deep exposure of this nebula in addition to the M42 in the same area. This area is also covered in beautiful nebulosity with great details and colour.
I originally intended to have a larger field for my image, but due to some mistakes, I needed to crop the image. First, every night, I used the previous nights images to get a feel for the field. Unfortunately, this meant that the field crept slowly to one side. Secondly, since the humidity was so low, I didn't bother pulling out the dew cap. When looking at the images afterwards, I noticed a faint "rainbow" pattern on the upper left part of the image. I realized this was light from the middle star in the Orion's belt shining in from the side and creating the rainbow. The following nights, I pulled out the dewcap and the rainbow was gone. But I had to crop the image to remove the hints of it. I had to drop about 2 hours worth of exposures, leaving me with about 10 hours 20 minutes of good to semi-good frames to stack.
I tried to get as much details out of the Flame nebula to the left. But I had to balance details for noise. And this is how far I got this time around. Maybe later I will try to kick the noise out to get more details.

Tech Details : Pentax K5, ISO 640, William Optics 132FLT w/ WO AFR-IV flattener/reducer (=F/5.6), on a 10Micron GM2000HPS mount. Guiding with QHY5-II with PHD2. 62x10 min exposures. Stacked in DSS, processed in FitsWork, PS and IrfanView.

M42, the never ending story

I guess M42 is the most imaged object in the skies. But there is a reason for that. It contains details and colours like almost no other object. And it is HUGE! You can image almost any field surrounding this nebula, and you will find more nebulosity. I have seen tight crops taken with long focal length telescopes, and wide field taken with short telelenses. They are all filled with beautiful nebulosity.
My latest take on this beautiful object is from my many nights under Moroccan skies the first two weeks of January this year. I had rented a William Optics 132FLT and had brought my own field flattener/reducer that I use for my own 98FLT. With that in place, I got a focal length of approximately 740mm give or take. Giving a slightly tight field of view.
I collected photons for several nights, totalling approximately 10 hours 30 minutes in 63 subexposures. In addition to 1 minute exposures for the central parts and 5 second exposures for the Trapezium.
I love the details I was able to extraxt from such a long exposure. My previous attempt only had 1 hour of exposure, and naturally, it lacked a lot. This version I absolutely loved working on!
I will probably make new attempts at processing this image at a later stage, but it is obvious from this short processing run that there is a lot to be extracted if I take the time. Click on the image for a larger version to enjoy the colours and the details!

Tech Details : Pentax K5, ISO 640, William Optics 132FLT w/ WO AFR-IV flattener/reducer (=F/5.6), on a 10Micron GM2000HPS mount. Guiding with QHY5-II with PHD2. 63x10 min exposures for the main parts, 70x1 min for the central parts and 70x5sec for the trapezium. Stacked in DSS, processed in FitsWork, PS and IrfanView.

Did a new processing of the image. Better color and details around the trapezium and, to me at least, a better color balance overall. Also decided to flip it "the right way" as seen from the Earth.

Close encounter of the rare kind

On the morning of January 9th 2016, Venus and Saturn flew past eachother no more than a few arc-minutes apart. There have been some of these events in my days, but most of them have been unubservable due to weather. It looked like I was going to miss this one too, as the clouds were pulling over the area where the planets were. But a few openings in the clouds let me take some quick photos. The following is a blend of two images, given that Venus is hundreds of times brighter than Saturn as seen from Earth. So I took two photos of varying length and blended them in PS. Click on the photo to get full-size image.

Tech data : Pentax K5, ISO640, William Optics 132FLT w/ AVR-IV resulting in F/5.6, Exposures 1/250th sec (Saturn) and 1/5000th sec (Venus). Blended in PS.