After shooting the moon as seen in the last post I slewed to my favourite open cluster, M37. This open star cluster is beautiful to observe in a telescope and when long exposures are shot the colour differences of the star within the cluster are revealed:
 |
| M37 Open Cluster (4600 lys) - 22 frames x 3 minutes |
December 2, 2011:Lot of work for little results! (but I'm slowly learning). This is ICI434 "The Horsehead Nebula". It is a very adim object right under Orion's eastern belt star (you can see the glare from the star creating the large flare on the left side of this picture). This object is more suited to larger aperture scopes than my 6" SCT.
 |
| ICI434 Horsehead Nebula (1500 lys) - 16 frames x 6.25minutes |
February 20, 2012:
Orion’s Nebula is a very popular nebula in the constellation of Orion the Hunter.
On February 20th I noticed it was going to be clear until midnight (very rare these days)… My intention was to image M81, a beautiful spiral galaxy near the big dipper. I was having trouble with computer guiding that close to the northern celestial pole so I decided to shoot M42 to the south.
This image is a combination of 27 – 45 second exposures and 12 – 225 second exposures yielding 1hr 5min total exposure. The short exposures captured the central detail in the nebula while the longer exposures provided the dim perimeter detail. They were manually combined using layer masking in GIMP (my first experience with layer masking). While processing this shot I was also very careful to ‘push’ the colour levels evenly to preserve the natural colour of the nebula, the way my camera ‘saw’ it!
I look forward to shooting more deep-sky images with a variety of exposure lengths so I can further develop my “layer masking” techniques!:
 |
| M42 Orion's Nebula (1600 lys) - 27 frames x 45sec & 12 frames x 3.75 minutes |
No comments:
Post a Comment