MarsG76

About a month ago I started to image the Dragon Face nebula region, in accordance with my plan to image more southern sky objects which are rarely imaged by amateurs. This area is just north of the Tarantula nebula on the edge of the Large Magellanic Cloud, within a star dense area of the sky. The density of stars can be seen as this was imaged at 2032mm and still the stars are dense like noise where stars are more spaced apart in my images taken at this focal length. In the FOV there are a number of nebulae within this frame, namely NGC2032, NGC2035 and NGC2040 which make up the Dragons Face. There are also NGC2020 which is he blue swirl top left and NGC2014 is the red veil directly under it. There is also NGC2021 that is bottom center of the frame and a faintly visible NGC2053 which is bottom right frame under and to the back of the "dragon face". This was imaged over multiple nights in RGB and through HAlpha, Sulfur II and Oxygen III filters using a full spectrum modded uncooled Canon 40D DSLR. Honestly the amount of time spent on SII and OIII was not necessary and it was wasted imaging time, the strongest data was RGB and HAlpha, adding SII and OIII made almost no difference to the look of the image after stacking and processing...

This has been imaged through the NexStar 8SE on the CGEM mount. This was imaged in the native 2032mm focal length (F10) through a Baader UV/IR Cut and Halpha 7nm filters and recorded by my modded Canon 40D DSLR. I experimented with trying to capture some UV data through the Astrodon UV filter but it was a failure on the horsehead... I talked about it in another post, but I think that stacking the UV data into the rest pulled the stars back to white from the redness caused by the HAlpha data. I used PHD 2.6.4 to Autoguide for the first time and I have to say that I like PHD 2 a lot, highly recommended... it is very good, my guiding accuracy (according to PHD2) was between 0.5" and 0.8" arc sec... I found it easy to get to grips with. Total data amount was 81 subs, 75 used in this image... HII: 29 x 15 minute ISO1600 RGB: 13 x 10 minute and 25 x 5 minute ISO800 UV: 8 x 20 minute ISO3200 So total time spent on integration was 850 minutes

This is a cropped image of the other Horsehead image which I imaged through the NexStar 8SE on the CGEM mount in the native 2032mm focal length and recorded by my modded Canon 40D DSLR. Total data amount was 75 used in this image... HII: 29 x 15 minute ISO1600 RGB: 13 x 10 minute and 25 x 5 minute ISO800 UV: 8 x 20 minute ISO3200 So total time spent on integration was 850 minutes

This is a 7 hour exposure of the M74 galaxy using a astro full specturm modded Canon 40D DSLR through a IR Cut filter. The image is taken with a Celestron 8" SCT at F6.3 through a focal reducer(1280mm focal length). The image consists of mostly 450s subs and approximately 1 hours of 120s subs, all at ISO 800. This galaxy is located at about 30 Million Light years distance from us, at for a magnitude 10 object it did seem like quite a faint object to image, this could be due to the it's low altitude throughout the whole exposure and a little bit of city light pollution in that part of the sky.

This is a 10 hour exposure of the NGC1055 galaxy using a standard Canon DSLR. The image is taken with a Celestron 8" SCT at F10 (2032mm focal length). The image consists of mostly 600s subs and approximately 2 hours of 90-150s subs, all at ISO 800. This galaxy is located at about 60 Million Light years distance from us, and at a magnitude of 12.5 is quite a faint object to image, especially when there is a little bit of light pollution with in the par of the sky it is imaged at... Looking at the result, I probably should have used the f6.3 FR to have less over sampling and most likely capturing more light in the same amount of time, or same amount in less time... end result most probably, at worst, would have been the same if not very similar and at best there might have been a bit more detail captured since guiding at 63% of the focal length and not oversamplig the subs would not be as susceptible to seeing/star fluctuations/movement.