Eastern Veil

[Stub Mandrel]

What a difference a dark sky makes!

I knew I could get the blue as well as the red bits out of the Veil but a dark sky and reasonably cool night have let me get an image with rich nebula colours and nice stars too:

 

 

[Iainp]

Lovely! I don't know if you captured this last night, but skies were pretty good here in Cambridgeshire last night too. 

Iain

[Stub Mandrel]

Yes, last night.

[Iainp]

You've inspired me Neil. I'm in the middle of trying to capture this right now (midnight) but with an unmodded Nikon D3100 and a maximum of 20 second exposure, I'm not expecting great things... Having said that, I just stacked the first 3 subs to check everything is working, and the veil is already visible, faintly through the noise. Full result tomorrow

Iain 

[Stub Mandrel]

I look forward to it, Ian. The blue should be easy to get if the red is showing up with an unmodded camera!

[MattJenko]

Unmodded - nice. I would love to have a crack at this object. Its just sooo big!

[Iainp]

Here is is.  Hope you don't mind me putting it here. It's not worthy of its own post, arguably it should never be allowed to see the light of day,  but having spent 3 hours on it, I'm darn well going to post it somewhere! 

52 X 20sec subs + bias and flats. It was extremely faint in the original final composite in DSS but with some over-the-top processing, at least something comes through.  On a positive note, it shows it's possible to get a sort of result even with such a small amount of data, and I've set the bar low for myself ready for future improvements.  I really must get the tracking sorted on the old mount, to get to 30 sec exposures at least. Also I realised at the end of the night that the front plate of the scope was completely misted over, so I was making things even more difficult.  

I'll be back...

Iain 

[laudropb]

Very nice image Neil