Category: Deep Sky

I think I’ve reached the end of usable data from Friday night. The first image acquired (and last to be processed) is the Seahorse Nebula, one of my favorites since childhood. I also took another crack at a Pleiades widefield. I recently published a shot of the Pleiades taken with my ASI533MC Pro, this one was taken with my 2600MC Pro which has a significantly larger format.

One thing I love about astrophotography is you don’t have to take anyone’s word about stuff like this. You can take a telescope and camera, or sometimes just a camera, and take a picture of your own.

I spent Friday night at the River Ridge Observatory shooting a few objects. I had two rigs going, three counting the stationary DSLR doing star trails. The long night allowed me to break it into three imaging sessions and the last one was dedicated to one object with two rigs – the Rosette Nebula in the constellation of Monoceros (the Unicorn).

The Rosette Nebula is a large cloud of energized hydrogen, an HII region we call it. It’s about a degree across, or about twice the apparent width of the Moon. Stars are forming inside it now. Click on each thumbnail for a larger view.

Finally, a closeup of the Rosette taken at 539mm focal length.

I may be the last astrophotographer to try PixInsight, but have decided to try it. I’ve picked several recent images and reprocessed them in PI, usually starting with the previously stacked 32 bit result from DeepSkyStacker but once or twice restacking the original FIT files in PI as well. I’ve got a lot to learn. While I think each of these new images are better than their predecessor, I realize that is subjective and not all will agree.

In each case below, the old workflow is on the left and new on the right. By necessity, the thumbnails on the right are smaller but click on them for a full sized image.