At last with all the bad weather out and clouds in the UK, I managed to get some imaging done last night with good ish skies and no real moon glare.


Managed to get a few other targets as well such as the bubble nebula and the cone nebula, but yet to process these.

So here is the Horse and Flame nebulas in Orion.

Shot with the Skywatcher ED120 900mm F7.5 refractor via a EOS 1000D Baader modded and Astronomik CSL clip LP filter.

Couldn't guide with the off axis guider as no decent stars for the framing I wanted, so used the trusty Skywatcher ED80 Pro II with QHY5 / PHD combo.

Subs were 1 hour of 5mins and 1.5 hours of 10mins at ISO 800

A bit of processing (well a lot) in Photoshop to give this result.

Hope you like it even though the JPG comversion has messed it up a bit around the stars.




Cat

that is a very good image the best ive seen this year Well Done Cat........kev

excuse my ignorance, not started guiding yet (nearly there), but isn't it possible to utilise Alnitak?

Lovely image. Looking at the lengths of exposure necessary, and thanks for giving exposure details. Helps me appreciate why I get so little with 1 hour of 2 minute frames using an unmodded 1000. An excellent example of what is possible with this camera. Thanks.

M.

Yes it is possible to use any star to guide if bright enough for your guide cam. But with my off axis guider, the guide chip was above this image and so he / she wasn't available or any other stars. Stioll learning my Off Axis Guider (OAG).

Wow, fantastic pic !!

Nice framing and capture Cat
A couple of questions.....have you isolated certain stars and areas of nebulousity before applying noise reduction?
The reason I ask is that certain stars have a much sharper quality than the background ones.

Mishmash...re. guiding. Guiding on a big bright star causes no end of problems, as it's not small enough on the chip.
The best guiding results come from using 4th or 5th magnitude stars, but of course it all depends on the length of guide exposures.
I'm currently guiding on much fainter ones, but using 4.5 second guide exposures, as I don't want too short exposures as I'll end up chasing the seeing.

Cheers
Rob

Rob,

Yes selective PS processing was done on this image to bring out the key areas. Excuse my mistakes as I am still learning, but what great fun learning is

Main processing was colour balance, curves , levels and then selective brightness / contrast on areas of the image.

I like to smooth some of my images, to give that almost painted impression as an art work. I suppose it is a taste, but not too much smoothing as the long exposures do most of the noise reduction for you.



All in the artistic licence we are allowed

Now thats nice. Very smooth with plenty of data, like the colours, great stuff

Philj

Hello Catanonia, I agree if you ease back on the smoothing you have a cracking image there

Thanks guys,

An old favorite revisited for a Challenge on POTN astro section.

Really wish the skies would clear so I could give this about 8 hours and not have to process so much

Steve, you really shouldnt struggle to get a guide star in Orion. Have you got the focus very good for the guider? I have not once failed to have a suitable star available, even at F10 with my C9.25.

Have a play with the settings, are you using PHD? try longer exposures as Rob mentions, I generally use 3 seconds or so.

You'll get there

Very dramatic image Steve and nicely framed.