Eta Carinae Nebula

I was so excited to go back again to Caliraya with my family. And the weather last Saturday was promising that I imagined myself imaging the southern skies with a wide grin on my face. Hopes were high when we arrived at Caliraya Lake with the blue sky mirrored at the waters. "This could be it," I said to myself, as I gazed over the southern sky, somehow imagining the Great Eta Carina Nebulae just hovering above the mountaintops. I hurriedly set-up my gears and prepared for a good night of southern sky imaging. Darkness fell and soon my scope was aimed at the Eta Carinae Nebulae. That was the first time I used the Megrez 90 and Zenithstar80 tandem for dual camera imaging, which saved me a lot of time in image acquisition. But of course all good things must come to end as my batteries were eventually gets depleted. I was able to shoot a good 45 minutes of images before the batteries drained out. As usual, I did a quick processing to see how the nebula looks like. Hmm... not bad.... not bad at all....

California Nebula during Easter

This work-break allowed me to finally process and add color data to my previous H-alpha only NGC1499. The H-alpha subs were taken two years ago and they were among the first lights of my H-alpha filter. The color subs were taken in Buso-buso during the Christmas break-New Year's Eve in fact. Early in processing, I was getting errors during registration of the images as the H-alpha and color subs were of different scales and orientation-taken with 558mm F.L. Megrez 90 and 200mm F.L. lens respectively. After three attempts, I stopped, went outside for fresh air and had snacks. I went back in front of the computer and tried again. It took me five attempts before I got it right-it seemed. Talk about processing! Usually its harder than image acquisition.

Crescent Nebula

The Full Moon beamed that clear night as I reminisced my time under starry skies. How I wished I was there at a dark hill with only starlight illuminating the sky! I reckoned that the closest to this astro-tripping was to do some exercises in image-processing. so, I brought out my previous capture files and decided to do some redux on the Crescent Nebula. I remembered that I acquired the subs at home and at Buso-buso. I again quickly did processing and compared the result with the previous I had. Well, slight improvement but an improvement nonetheless, enough to quench this astro-thirst at the moment.