IC1396 - widefield

[rocketandroll]

Ok, last one of my pics from last night...

this is again taken with the 350D and the 200mm f2.8 prime lens...

it is the area around IC1396 (I hope it is at least! :-)

This is the area incorporating the elephant trunk nebula and other features...

lots of LP and not enough exposure length has meant not a lot of the nebulosity has shown up.

This is about 45mins of data captured at ISO 800 in 40 second subs, should have gone for 80 second or so subs, the tracking should have handled it.

Anyway, it's not bad considering I don't have an LP filter and how close the target was to the horizon in my 'edge-of-town' location.

Cheers all

Ben

[Uranium235]

Thats a lot of stars! How is your camera modded? (Filter replace or remove) Becuase I would have expected a lot more red (or pink) from this target, but i can make it out well enough

Try an astronomik clip filter, that will make a big difference to your max sub time without getting washed out by LP.

[rocketandroll]

Thats a lot of stars! How is your camera modded? (Filter replace or remove) Becuase I would have expected a lot more red (or pink) from this target, but i can make it out well enough

Try an astronomik clip filter, that will make a big difference to your max sub time without getting washed out by LP.

It is indeed a LOT of stars :-)

it's a filter removed jobby afaik, got it second hand pre-modded.

The original shot was all fairly uniformly orange/pink but a lot of that was from the LP.

It's been a struggle pulling any colour out of the nebula from behind the LP to be honest. As you say, in most full colour images I've seen of it it is fairly red, like my NGC7000 pic is.

Gonna get me a filter next week then have another go with longer subs and more data... wanna be able to at least see the elephant trunk etc in it.

Ben

[rocketandroll]

So...

I'm gonna have another stab at this Wed or Thur this week.

I recon if I stick with this one target I can get up to 60 sec exposures and grab at least 150 minutes of data on it.

Considering this first attempt was 30 minutes or so of data... What should I change for the next attempt?

It was a nightmare trying to get rid of the background noise on this one. I will be using an LP filter this time round but I'm also wondering if I should go down to 400asa instead of 800asa to try and reduce the noise?

Or will 5X as much data at 800asa with the LP filter be better at reducing the noise and getting more of the nebula than going down to 400asa?

Don't want to waste the opportunity so I'm really interested in peoples view on which would produce a better, smoother result?

Cheers!!

Ben

[ollypenrice]

Hmmm... I couldn't recognize any of IC1396 in this so I offered it to to Registar to register against my own version. I tried it as presented here, vertically flipped and horizontally flipped but Registar was never able to see a correlation between this and mine. Not conclusive proof by any means but I'm not convinced you were in the right place. In a fast lens it really ought to show unequivocally, though it is not bright other than in Ha. Here is mine;

http://ollypenrice.smugmug.com/Photography/Widefield-images-including/IC-1396-HARGB-2-3X1-HRS/936701075_jhrMy-X3.jpg

Maybe someone could plate solve your image? I don't have the software.

Olly

[rocketandroll]

It's definitely IC1396 :-)

There are a few recognisable bits in there and I've run it through astrometry.net's blind solver and it certainly recognised several stars and said IC1396 was in the frame.

I'm gonna run this again this week, should be able to get 2hrs+ of data this time. Gonna use a LP filter this time which should help... I'm just wondering if it's worth dropping down to iso400 instead of 800? I want to cut down all that horrible noise, don't want to loose the detail in the nebula though?

Thoughts?

Ben

[rocketandroll]

Sorry, didn't mean to repeat myself, it told me it had failed to post that last reply this morning. Doh!

Ben

[rocketandroll]

Thought this would help... as you started making me doubt myself!!! :-)

The go-to was absolutely bang-on with NGC7000 etc so I didn't think this could be far off... IC1396 is actually dead central in the frame, it's just the LP and poor processing on my part make it hard to make out.

I went to look at the location based on the astrometry.net solution in worldwide telescope... below is the worldwide telescope view of IC1396 on the right with the garnet star at the top, and my image re-oriented to match with the garnet star and the line of three core stars highlighted to show the framing. The elephant trunk is on the right, but not really visible in my image.

I really hope the LP filter will really drag this out this coming week... hoping to get something a bit closer to yours Olly :-)

Cheers!

Ben