Gamma Cygni Region (IC1318)

I took advantage of relatively clear skies last weekend albeit the almost full moon. I first took h-alpha subs on Saturday then the color subs on Sunday. I had difficulty getting the color subs as the light pollution at our house was so severe and aggravated by a nearby street light. I experimented and settled for just one minute subs for a total of 36 minutes before the clouds rolled in. Image processing proved to be difficult as well due to noise and lack of data. Anyway, just to satisfy the craving for astro imaging, I sacrificed some hours of no sleep to image the nebula in the vicinity of Sadr or Gamma Cygni.

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.

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.

The Seagull in Flight

I finally had the chance to test my new 200 mm lens last Monday night. There were high altitude clouds and severe light pollution at home but I wanted to see how wide will be the Field of View of this lens. So, I set up my astro equipments and started shooting. One thing I learned was that it was very hard to nail the focus at F2.8. A good focusing aid should be next in my to-do list. I hope it will not be too late to image this nebula again in colors next time I head out to a dark site.

M31 Galaxy (Sleepless in Vancouver)

Jet lag-I hate it. Since I arrived here last Sunday, I never had a good night's rest. So instead of lying in bed and forcing myself to sleep, I kept myself awake by processing my M31 image. I was not optimistic that there would be improvement as the raw subs were not good. I shot these last year at home using very short subs fearing that light pollution would overwhelm the signal. IRIS somehow extracted the galaxy from the uneven gradient of light pollution and I was a bit satisfied with the new results! Now, when will be the next new moon?

Jellyfish Nebula (IC 443 & SH2-249)

I though that this rainy season would not end. Yet, last Wednesday night at home was a surprise in many ways. Firstly, it was unusually clear-no big thick clouds. Secondly, Polaris was clearly visible above my northern horizon where its perennially smoggy and lastly, we have a new dog which was not taken into consideration in my imaging set-up. As I gazed the sky, the temptation to bring out my gears from long storage was simply overpowering. Heck, why the wait? At least I will know if I can still tighten my mount's altitude bolt properly! As expected, it took me more than an hour in setting up after a long time of no imaging practice. Much of the delays were due to our beloved dog who obviously enjoyed pulling off the dangling wires from the mount.

I had to overlook the beautiful Orion beaming that time. Deciding on what H-alpha target was difficult as there were plenty of worthy choices. I settled on a relatively obscure IC443 and nearby SH2-249 nebulae. Framing both of them in my 3 degree field necessitated orienting the camera to north-is-up direction which was new to me. Clouds briefly interrupted a few shots but I was able to gather a 2-hour total exposure which was enough to quench my astro-imaging thirst.

I immediately processed the subs and in my eagerness, I was not careful in controlling some highlights and noise. Well, re-processing it sometime together with color data will be my project soon. But, it was definitely a good fun under the stars after long while.

Horse Head Nebula

It's weekend again! After a tiring work week it's time to unwind and relax. And what a better way to amuse myself than to do image processing. I have a set of color subs of the Horse head / Flame Nebula taken way back January 2009 in Caliraya, Laguna. It's 14 subs at 3 minutes each taken during one of our sessions there. That time I used my stock Canon 400D. Then, after a year I got hold of a H-alpha filter and made first light with it capturing the same object from our home. I accumulated 15 H-alpha subs of 4 minutes each using a modified Canon 350d. After getting some experience from doing composites of the Rosette and Crescent Nebula, I tried again combining the color and H-alpha subs. I was not expecting a stunner due to meager number of subs but still hoped for an improvement over my previous Horse head image. I first combined the red channel of the full color shot with the H-alpha then re-combined it again with the color image. I guessed that was called an HaR-RGB composite image. The H-alpha regions stood out while the natural star colors were maintained although some color noise were evident. Not bad, I supposed. Looking at the previous color image, the composite HaRGB image now seemed a lot better. What a really perfect way to spend the weekend!