Couple Attempts at the California Nebula

[Knight of Clear Skies]

Made the effort to get out last night as looking at the forecast and Moon cycle it will probably be my last chance for a couple weeks. Had a bit of a nightmare session, I'm suffering with a cold and seemed to be stuck in stupid mode. Trying to start my imaging run before polar aligning was just one of several errors. Couldn't find my primary target, NGC7822 - possibly it is too faint to show up framing shots with my local LP, or I may simply have been looking in the wrong place. Then I couldn't find the California Nebula despite taking a few subs of it a few nights ago. Decided to switch to my 200mm Takumar and try the Pleiades as I couldn't miss that, but with the extra weight my mount was unhappy with the balance. Finally I used my 50mm lens to search out California, centered it and put the 135mm lens back in. Wasted more than a hour of good conditions in the end but finally got up and running.

The is last night's data, just over 30 minutes worth, after a lot of random flailing around in Photoshop and StarTools to try and bring out the nebula while suppressing the gradients.

135mm Takumar f2.5 lens at f4.0, 105 second subs, ISO 800. 30 dark bias, no darks or flats.

Also had a go at adding my data from the previous session to the stack using intersection mode, about another 15 minutes worth at f4.5 using 90 second subs. This gave me a very wide and short image, so I cropped off the sides to get this.

Worth the frustration in the end but I'd have liked another hour on it. The 135mm f2.5 Takumar I picked up the other day produces a very flat image at f4.0 but bright stars near the corners end up with an off-centre halo. I'll carry on playing with this and the Sadr Region data over the next couple weeks, I'm sure they can be tidied up a bit more.

Hope you like the images, any constructive criticism would be gratefully received.

[robbie c]

Well it was worth it in the end you got a couple of nice images there

[Pete Presland]

at least you ended up with something, all these things are sent just to test us.