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.

North Amercian nebula

A few days of clear nights left me with sleepless nights, sleepy days at work, and a lot of exposures on my harddrive. I decided I needed to exploit these nights as much as possible. I tried som filtered exposures. Like the propeller nebula previously posted.
On Friday, I was supposed to go out of town and to a darker place with some guys from my local astroclub. But the weather changed suddenly. And the area was wet with fog. So after waiting for a while for it to clear, I finally gave up. I packed up my gear, and on the way back, I decided to drive up to a spot on the hill overlooking the city. I had been there before to image a comet with another guy. The place was too close to the city to be really dark, but it as high enough to leave the fog and smoke of the city below. And this affected the light pollution. So the night sky was actually quite clear and relatively dark. I decided to try my luck at imaging with DSLR and my own "quasi-h-alpha"-filter that I have described here earlier.
I pointed at the North American nebula (NGC7000) in the constellation Cygnus. Trained the autoguider and set off a number of 10-minute exposures. Then laid back in the front seat of the car and slept for a few hours. The guiding was so-so, but adequate for me to get relatively round stars in the images. When I got home, I processed the images, and was pleased to see a clear and detailed image of the nebula. It probably could do with some more exposure to get more details out of the darker area, but for now, this experiment was successful. The filter I used is simply a deep red filter mostly used to take IR-photos in daylight. Since these are filters for photo-lenses, they do not come in 48mm sizes. The nearest was 46mm. So I ordered a 48mm-46mm stepdown adapter. This made it possible to attach it to any 48mm filter holders. There is, of course, some vignetting. But nothing that a good set of flats cannot compensate. It is NOT a substitute for a true narrowband H-alpha filter. But it is a much better alternative than nothing. And it is cheap. Very cheap.

Tech details : Pentax K5, ISO640, 18x10 min exposures. 0 darks, 0 bias, 20 flats. William Optics FLT98 @F/5 w/ WO AFR-IV. Celestron AVX mount. QHY 5II guide camera controlled by PHD2. Stacking in DSS, processing in FitsLiberator and PS.

Propeller nebula

Ever since I saw an image of this nebula, I wanted to image it. The shape was so unusual. Normally, a nebula is a beautiful caos, but this one? Like s off-shaped propeller. Like the name suggests. A few weeks ago, I started testing my new CCD-camera with narrowband filters. So far, I have only tried the h-alpha filter. It is truly a blessing in the city. Cutting through the light pollution like a knife. So I have tried my luck on a few objects. And the past week, the skies have cleared every night, so I tried longer exposures on the nebula. Many of the exposures had crappy guiding, but I managed 7.5 hours of 10-minute exposures. And I managed to draw the nebula out quite nicely.

Tech spec : Atik 420M camera, -15C, 47x10 min 1x1 binning, 50 darks, 50 bias, 20 Baader 7nm H-alpha filter. William Optics Star 71mm F/4.9 telescope. Celestron AVX mount, QHY5II guide camera controlled by PHD2. Stacking in DSS, Processing in FitsLiberator, PS, and IrfanView.

Pacman

First (almost) light with my CCD-camera. I bought it at NEAF in 2014, but haven't really gotten around to start using it. I even bought a set of Baader NB filters and a wheel. But it had mostly been sitting there unused. On Sunday, the skies clear. Sort of. and I wanted to give it a try. After some checking on starmaps, I found that the Pacman nebula would be nice. Using my 71mm apo refractor, the field would be a bit larger than the nebula, so it would be nicely framed. The chip on the CCD is so small compared to the DSLR that I had a hard time finding and framing the object. It took me a while to get used to working with the "straw-view" of the skies. But I finally found the image on my screen. And I set up a sequence of images to be taken before I went to bed. Let the autoguider do its work and hoped the morning would find a nice image.
I had set up a sequence of 48 5-minute frames through a Baader H-alpha filter. I stacked them, and the image was far from good. When I got back from work, I checked through the images, and found that 16 of them either had bad guiding or had clouds drifting through them. I removed them and restacked. Much better. But still not what I had hoped. I figured that what was missing, was dark frames. The next night, I put the camera in a small plastic box (without lid) outside, set the temperature to the same as the night before (-15C) and let it run through a sequence of darks during the night (which was cloudy). 50 darks each for 30s, 1, 2 and 5 minutes. I picked the 5 minute darks and restacked the image with darks and the flats I had taken the morning of the imaging session. MUCH better. The following is therefore the first "real" light of my new camera. I am hoping for more clear nights in the months ahead so I can gain some experience using CCD with a filter wheel.

Tech details : Atik 420M camera, 32x5 min binning 1x1 through Baader 7nm H-alpha filter. William Optics 71mm f/4.9 5-element flatfield apo, Celestron AVX mount. Guided with QHY 5II and PHD. Stacked with DSS, DDP in FitsLiberator. Enhancements in PS and Irfanview.

Cats and war and peace

There are a number of beautiful nebulas in the constellation of Scorpio. I have tried to image a few of them. The image below is a framing of two of them. The "Cat's Paw" nebula and the "War and Peace" nebula. The first one I understood the naming of. It is obviously a cat's paw. But the second I didn't. Read up on it, and the story is that in infrared, the scientists studying it, thought one part looked like a skull and the other like a dove. Hence War and Peace...
Anyhow. This image is a 6-hour exposure of this area. Taken over two nights in Namibia. For all the objects I imaged, I tried to keep them above 40 degrees altitude. This to minimize the difference in extinction between the highest and the lowest point during the night.

Tech details : Pentax K5, ISO640, 60x6 minutes for a total of 6 hours exposure, William Optics Zenithstar 71mm F/4.9 five-element flatfield apo, Skywatcher EQ6 mount, guided by QHY5II and PHD. Stacked in DSS, DDP by FitsLiberator, processed in PS and IrfanView.