Friday, April 22, 2011

The Rosette Nebula


These past weeks, I've been experimenting with different approaches in combining H-alpha with RGB images. One particular object that I want to improve on is the Rosette Nebula. I tried tweaking the opacity of the blend and using newly discovered tools in Photoshop, I tried to improve the quality of the image and here is the result.

Wednesday, April 13, 2011

At the stinger of the Scorpion (NGC 6334 & NGC 6357)

A sad limitation of my observing place at home is the "Great Wall" that obstucts my view of the southern sky. I have always wanted to image the beautiful nebulas in Scorpious but its too far south for a target for my scope at home. Luckily, we were treated to a good sky last Monday. So, there's no hesitation that I pointed my 200mm lens towards Scorpious to capture the two elusive nebulas near the stinger of the scorpion. Here lies two large diffuse nebulas named Lobster and Cat's Paw nebulae. I intentionally included in the image the two bright stars, Epsilon and Lambda Scorpii as position reference to the nebulas. The starfields in this region of the sky are dense because they lie towards the center of the Milky Way.