Heart Nebula

Having recently returned from an amazing week on Lake Windemere and some lovely clear skies, that is apart from the full moon obliterating any decent view of the Perseid meteors. I had a few great eveinings doing some light painting on the lake. This means the scope has had a week off from action. So the new project is going to be an HOO image of the Heart Nebula IC1805. 5 minute sub exposures starting with the Optolong Ha filter. A total so far of 40 subs with a total of 200 minutes. A lucky capture on my first sub was a meteor breaking the Heart in two.

Over 3 nights I have been able to shoot Oiii data with 73 x 5 minute sub frames totalling 6Hr & 5 minutes. An induvidual sub offers the faintest hint of detail.

The full stack of 73 frames shows a vast amount of detail and a really clean noise free master frame. For some reason my blog will not let me upload the TIFF file so these Oiii frames are JPEGS (aghhhhhh)

I followed the same Pixinsight processing as before for the Crescent nebula. I am still new to this amazing programme and need YouTube tutorials to follow. I feel I have overdone the contrast here of on the final Star reduced image, so I will be looking at a few more Ha hours to boost the outer ring of Hydrogen gas. Watch this space. But for now please enjoy my Heart Nebula. A fitting tribute to Mum too, she sadly passed away some twelve years ago on this day.

One last thing to mention is the guiding, after some welcome rain the skies have been very transparent and the guide numbers have been incredible with RMS totals under 0.25 arc seconds. Images of the guide screen are on the tablet so I will try and upload a screenshot.

Just 3 Persieds.

Sitting and facing in a direction opposite to where the camera is pointing is a guarantee for me anyway for a failure to capture anything of significance especially when meteors are involved. A beautiful evening spent on the sun lounger I saw some really bright meteors  and a few really bright ones streaking through the Andromeda region and going south. The camera however  was under our pergola and left overnight to see what it could find.(covered jusy in case it rained) ISO 1600 and 20 second captures are the best my Canon can hope for without an excess of noise anyway. So here is the result a composite of 3 images with 3 faint streaks across the sky looking east.

 

Persied Meteor 2010

     We have spent the last few days down in Yeovil, Somerset visiting family far away from the clear skies of Norfolk.
     We all had a wonderful day at Longleat safari park too as I watched the skies clear above us on the drive back. The plan was to just sit the camera on the tripod and shoot from the back garden. A few test shots revealed a lovely orange sky. I decided there and then to get away. About 6 miles from Yeovil is a beautiful and reasonable dark site on top of Ham hill in Stoke Sub Hamden. I arrived at 11.30 pm to a car park full of meteor watchers. I found a quiet corner and started to shoot. We had an amazing view to the south Sagittarius was easily visible as the teapot sank below the hill and the milky way arched across the entire sky. Most of the cars disappeared about midnight and left me and another chap clicking away and chatting. We saw some amazing meteors that left a trails of smoke for sometimes 15 seconds after but annoyingly never in the direction of where our cameras we pointed. However I did capture this one flashing through Camelopardalis at 01:16:56 again leaving a trail of smoke behind it. I did capture about 30 others but none as bright as this one.

Cant decide if its worth sending to one of our publications.

Apologies

Hi fellow bloggers.

An apology to make to followers of my blog, The last couple of months have been pretty hectic with our new arrival. Aswell as awaiting conformation of my new job that was finally confirmed to me last week. It has been a long time coming. Now stress levels are beginning to subside i can make efforts into producing some new images. I am hoping for a clear night on the 12th/13th Aug hoping for a good meteor shower. I will Have the Canon piggy backed onto the mount for some nice constellation shots controlled by the laptop, as my 6 year old daughter Erin is going to stay up till midnight with me wrapped up in a sleeping back and pillows in our back garden in Norfolk.I bet she doesnt make it past 10pm I'll let you know how that one turns out.

PS Safe trip home Endeavour.

Persied Meteor Through Andromeda

After a couple of hours at our Great Ellingham observatory. We saw 4 or 5 meteors.

Came home and set up the Canon EOS40d on a tripod and connected the remote shooting software. I cought this fine meteor at 00.43 13/8/08. You will notice it perfectly disects the Andromeda galaxy.

30 second image ISO1000 Delicatly processed by Barnfield Bob (thanks Bob)