Horsehead nebula and the Burning Bush

The bright Orion belt star, Alnitak (O class), lies to the left (you can just see that it has a companion – B class).

The Burning Bush or Flame nebula is just below that (NGC 2024 or Sharpless-2 227).

To the right is Barnard 33 – the Horsehead dark nebula – dense, cold dust and gas backlit by a cloud of glowing hydrogen gas (IC 434).

Go left and downwards from B33 and there are two dust/gas cloud reflection nebulae lit by bright stars. The larger one is NGC 2023.The smaller is IC 435.

Altair Astro 480/80mm scope.
Canon 60Da at ISO 800 – 14 x 5 minute exposures.
Hutech LPS filter.
Guiding and dithering with SSAG/PHD.
Ioptron ZEQ25GT equatorial mount.
Drizzling and post processing in PixInsight.

30 flats (LCD panel – ISO800 at 1/20 sec)
30 darks

2 Sunny days

Am having difficulty setting up my Quark Chromosphere so went back to my old Celestron 102/1000mm refractor with solarscope filters for the hydrogen alpha shot.

The white light shot was taken as a single video with a less magnified 80/480mm refractor.

I think I need a long sunny morning when I can set up my 120/900mm Equinox ED for qhite light so as I can get tracking set then swop in the Quark chromosphere. I will also go back to my Skyris 274m CCD camera until I can get the settings on the Quark right.

M51: Adding data a year later

I started to image M51 a little while ago but only got 4 x 5 minute subs before the clouds came in – frustrated I gave up!
Its going to be a cloudy weekend here so I tried adding those 4 subs to my images of M51 taken about a year ago.
I think it has helped but I really need to get a bigger scope if Im going to get better galaxy images.
2 small spiral galaxies to the NE (if N is at the top) are IC 4263 and NGC 5169.

Also first use of drizzling technique in PixInsight to help improve resolution.

480/80mm refractor
Canon 60Da with AstroHutech LPS filter @ ISO 800
Now a total of 65 minutes imaging.
Ioptron ZEQ25GT mount with SSAG/PHD guiding/dithering

Orion on a clear night

Orion widefield: click to enlarge NGC 1981 open cluster and NGC 1977 running man reflection nebula: click to enlarge NGC 1977 running man reflection nebula: click to enlarge.

I have waited SO long for a clear night and at last it came! Orion is now low in the sky so this was my last chance to image these targets for this year. Set up as usual and wasn’t sure if I had a great polar alignment – also, the Orion nebula is so bright that long exposures burn out easily so I chose 2 minutes as a good compromise. I was keen to use “dithering” with my auto-guider  as it is said to reduce noise and bring out subtle detail – seemed to work very well. Am also now using “Neat Image” anti-noise software which has made a big difference.

Although it doesn’t look like much, I am very fond of open cluster NGC 1981 as it is the first object I looked at in a star atlas then decided to try and find with my telescope (a 8.75 inch Dobsonian). My old sky diary from 2009 is here: http://www.johnapurvis.synology.me/sky_diary.html

480/80mm refractor. Canon 60Da at ISO 800, 14 x 2 min sub-exposures. Astro-Hutech LPS filter. Ioptron ZEQ25GT mount. SSAG/PHD auto-guiding/dithering (dithered: every sub at 2 pixels). Focusing and camera sequencing/control with BackYard EOS. 30 darks and 25 flats (white LED panel: 1/20s @ ISO 800).

Post-processed in PixInsight 1.8 and Photoshop CC 2014. Noise reduction with Neat Image.

M45 Pleiades: A year in astrophotography

Click to enlarge

A favourite winter target.

Due to cloud,  this was only a 25 minute integration (5 x 5 mins) taken at ISO 800 with a Canon 60Da fitted with a Hutech LPS filter. Id hoped to get about 2 hours of data.
480/80mm refractor with x 1.0 field flattener ( a small bristle from a blower brush, accidentally stuck on, caused the diffraction spikes!).
Ioptron ZEQ25GT mount with SSAG/PHD autoguiding.
Backyard EOS camera control and PHD/Backyard EOS dithering.
18 darks and 40 flats (1/20s at ISO 800).
Post-processed in PixInsight and Photoshop.

Ive been at astrophotography for about a year now – my first attempts were with the Pleiades:

Canon 5D mark II and a 70-200mm f4 IS L lens, wide open at f4.
A single 30 second exposure on an alt-az mount.

M45 Pleiades. Some nebulosity can be seen around Merope and some of the other stars (exponential tranform in PixInsight)

AR 2209 on 15th November 2014

Its getting difficult to image the Sun in my back garden. Up here at 55N, the Sun doesn’t get too high in the winter and trees, neighbours’ houses and other obstacles become more of a problem. At the moment, I run out of light at about 1430 UT.

These were taken around 1300 UT with two telescopes. The full disc false colour Sun was taken with a 480/80mm refractor and the medium view and close-up with a 1000/102mm refractor.  A TeleVue 2.5xBarlow lens was used for the close-up..

AR2209  is actually monster sunspot AR 2192 back again after traversing the farside.

It seems just as active as it was before with a M3.2 class solar flare today at 1240 UT.