Blogging fell by the wayside

I have been incredibly busy since Christmas and unfortunately forgot to make any posts as a result. I have done some astrophotography and enjoyed the few clear nights England provided. Here are a few of the objects I imaged over the last few months:


vdb14 was a bit of a challenge for me. It is a faint bit of nebulosity in the constellation Camelopardalis. You don't see many images of it so I wasn't quite sure the orientation the camera should be in initially but that was sorted after one sub. The main problem is my scope/image train does not necessarily like broadband emissions, and in particular the blue wavelength. I get bloated stars on all blue and Luminance frames which make processing especially difficult. This is the reason I tend to stick to narrowband images for the time being. Despite these issues, I was thrilled with how it turned out.

vdb14

The all-too-familiar Horsehead Nebula. I hadn't imaged this since I first began astrophotography and thought it about time I hit it again. I wanted to get the depth and detail that Hydrogen-alpha provided but also not lose the blue reflection nebaul below the HH. As always in this region, keeping Alnitak (off frame to left) from ruining the photo is always a fun challenge. I think I managed to succeed fairly well with this final result.

Horsehead Nebula



I also decided I wanted to try out a few more planetary nebulas. I only got one managed with out few clear nights but it provided enough of a challenge. I shot it in narrowband so have no star colors, something which I would like to eventually remedy, but the depth and detail of the Owl Nebula itself made me happy. This is an easy nebula to have washed out and not get any of the inner detail/stars. It was a processing challenge to keep that and bring out the rarely seen outer OIII halo, but I am always up for a challenge (even if I do not always succeed). Here was the final result, although I do wish to revisit this in RGB to add some star colors and perhaps better nebula color as well.

M97 - Owl Nebula



I don't do many galaxies, mainly due to the blue bloat I mentioned earlier but am trying to expand my repertoire and so had a crack at M106 in RGB. A slew of new processing techniques and new "beta" actions I created helped me out with this one and although I had to do alot of work to keep the color manageable (esp in the blue wavelength) I think it paid off:

M106



And now to end on something in our solar system. I got a Philips SPC900NC webcam and a Televue 3x barlow to start to learn planetary imaging. Man, its tricky! I did manage to finally get Mars looking like Mars and will call that a successful planetary attempt even though it isn't the greatest and is still very grainy. Hopefully I will have more and will probably have a whole blog on planetary imaging at some point.

Mars - 29 Mar 2012

For the British winter, I did manage a decent amount of astrophotos among everything else I was doing, to check out more see my website at http://www.eprisephoto.com/astrophotography.

Hopefully will have a proper blog post soon!