Partial Lunar Eclipse 26 June 2010

I was waiting for this night since March but I cannot hide my skepticism if the weather would cooperate by mid-June. Sure enough, the whole day of June 26, 2010 was cloudy, overcast even. Rain started falling at around 6:00 pm so I had to abandon all my plans for imaging the eclipse. While I was sitting by my computer feeling sorry about the weather, my wife shouted that the eclipsed Moon was penetrating the clouds. I hurriedly took my camera and began shooting the Moon. I chose one shot taken at 8:42 pm when the clouds uncovered the beautiful eclipsed Moon.

Crescent Nebula (NGC6888)

This 3-day weekend off gave me enough time to re-process a few of my images captured previously. The H-alpha subs were taken at home while the color subs at Buso-buso. It also gave me opportunity to practice and experiment combining H-alpha with color images. But I have to learn more. This image did not turn out what I had expected but a good exercise nonetheless. I didn't crop the image to capture more of the red nebulosity of the background albeit the elongated stars at the corners.

Helix Nebula

Tonight is New Moon. I'm supposed to be under the beautiful night sky. Why is that rainy season starts early in June? Somehow, I felt that this astro season ended so soon. I could have imaged more wondrous objects in Scorpius, Cygnus and Sagittarius. But here I am tonight, listening to the rain as it makes its unwelcome noise on our tin roof. So instead of feeling sorry, I started to look at my old images and tried to re-process them. This time, I was able to try a few tricks in processing astro images. First on the list was the Helix Nebula I took in November 2009 in Buso-buso, Antipolo. I started to re-stack the images and adjust it in Photoshop CS. I made some color balancing and gradient control. These brought out more pleasant colors of the nebula. Comparing the new image with the old really made my night. (day?)

The Crescent Nebula in Cygnus

This the second object I planned to capture last Saturday. The H-alpha subs were taken at home and waiting for the color exposures. Finally, I was able to take a total of 2-hour color exposures from Buso. I did not use my focal reducer/field flattener as I thought that the resulting image would be small. However, I had to crop half of the image size to remove the elongated stars. I still want to gain experience in combining H-alpha with color and this was a good exercise for me.

Blue Horsehead in Scorpious

I was not able to process the shots from last Saturday in Buso-buso as we went on a family vacation in Hong Kong. As soon as we arrived, I started to process the first object which was a very faint reflection nebula in Scorpious. I have been waiting for a trip to a dark site for this as the Scorpion was not visible from our house. The sky at Buso was remarkable last Saturday. The Summer Milky Way was beaming and I could feel the perspective of being in its outer spiral arms. The temptation of shooting many objects that night was simply overpowering. But I had to stick to my two planned objects. I did not use my telescope for this object as it was large. The 70-300mm lens was used on the 350D for capturing IC4592, the so-called Blue Horsehead. There's not much images of it on the web and most if not all were taken using very high end equipments. I was wondering how it would look like using just a camera zoom lens and DSLR. At first I felt I was just wasting my time as the subs did not register even the slightest hint of nebulosity. I merely used the guidepost stars to approximate the nebula's location for framing. Worse, I made a mistake in getting the flat-light frames. Just what I had expected the stacked image didn't turn out well. The image was very faint, the background gradient was uneven, and noise was unbearable. Initially, I wanted to give up on it but I tried to convince myself that I could learn more by challenging my skills on Photoshop. I made aggressive stretching to bring out the colors in addition to heavy background gradient control. This is a 3-hour long total exposure at F6.3, ISO 800. I planned to re-visit this object using my Megrez 90 and do some mosaic.

Cygnus Dreamin' Part 2

Hey, its been clear night skies since the start of the week and I just felt guilty of wasting three nights in a row doing nothing for the advancement of amateur astronomy in the Philippines-meaning, I was too lazy to set-up my gears. Scorpious was awesome at midnight and the Summer Milky Way was simply fantastic! So, to redeem myself of my inactivity, I set up my astro gears last night, tested the alignment and covered everything with a big plastic sheet for an astrophotography session the following dawn. I intended to shoot some nebulosity in Cygnus as this was visible from our roofdeck. Actually, I have always wanted to shoot objects in Scorpious but the Great Wall of our house blocks the beautiful southern skies. Anyway, I went to sleep and set my mobile phone to alarm at 2 am - just in time for Cygnus to be well placed in the northeastern sky. I had difficulty rising up when my phone sounded its wake-up alarm. I just had a couple of hours sleep and the warm bed beckoned me to sleep a little more. Heroic minute-for the love of astronomy immediately flashed in my head and I found myself booting-up my laptop for imaging session. The sky was relatively clear and I had no trouble finding the guidepost stars in Cygnus. I looked up the position of the Crescent Nebula from The Sky software and manually star-hopped until I found it. I thought that it would be better if I removed the Focal Reducer to gain some better image scale but that proved to be costly mistake. I had to focus again and it took me almost an hour to nail the focus and re-acquire the image. Time flew fast and it was already 3:15 am when the first sub was taken. I set 30 subs at 3 minutes each on the GuideMaster software and let it do the acquisition and guiding. I went down and took a catnap until my wife woke me up to tell that its already bright outside. I hurriedly went outside and was amazed that the sky was really bright even it was still 5 am. I had to thrash several subs due to skyglow and left me with only 20 useable subs. I dismantled my gears and started to do the processing while having breakfast. Here is the result of the beautiful Crescent Nebula in the star-filled region of the Milky Way. This is a work in progress and I hope I can add some color data later on when we go to Buso, Antipolo this weekend.

Cygnus Dreamin'

The inavailability of the SLA Camp in Buso for the month of April got me stucked at home during weekends. This meant that I had to contend myself in doing H-alpha narrowband imaging. The galaxy season was coming to close and the rising Scorpious, Sagittarious and Cygnus were prime targets for H-alpha. I wanted to shoot some good targets in Scorpious but these were inaccessible from my place. So, I had no other choice but to look for worthy targets in the northern part of the sky. Looking at The Sky planetarium program, I chose the Witch's Broom or NGC6960. I reckoned that it was best to image it at around 3 am when it was considerably high in sky from my place. So i set-up my gears the night before, went to sleep then woke up to the alarm of my clock at 2 in the morning. Here I made 27 frames of 4 minutes each. I have yet to add some color data to this monochrome image when we are able to get back to a dark sky.