Imaging set-up complete but what to image?

[beamer3.6m]

Right I have the following

Equipment:

Explorer 200

Skylus guidescope piggybacked

HEQ5 with synscan upgrade

Canon 400d

Toucam Pro II

Laptop

PHD

Cartes Du Ciel

Location:

not great for light pollution, although the town does not cause problems I have 3 street lights opposite the garden.

Question:

What are the recommended DSO's for capture at this time of year.

I have previously done M57, M27, M31 and M51

I like nebula's just to be awkward or galaxy's.

I really want to know the object, the length of total subs required together with some detail on the quality of the sky required.

Any help would be appreciated.

[narrowbandpaul]

may i recommend IC1318, very near to gamma cyg. Go for as long as you can to avoid flexure, washed out from light pollution etc. Take as many images as you can...and capture them in RAW format. The 12 bit nature means you can get away with longer subs.

Also, the wall in the north american nebula (NGC 7000), the pelican nebula (IC5070...i think), its next to NA neb. Crescent nebula (NGC6888), not far from gamma cyg. Bubble Nebula (NGC7635, near M52), the veil nebula (NGC6992, NGC6960) near 52 cygni.

With nebula, you must take as long subs as you can get away with. SLR dont have a great response to Ha, which all nebula emit. The more images you can take, the lower the noise, and the better SNR you will have.

Perhaps a LPR filter will help you, but you can remove the LP during processing. But you will need a low noise image to remove it effectively.

The whole of cygnus is amazing

Good Luck

[steppenwolf]

I can only agree - anything in Cygnus that has the word 'nebula' after it would be my choice - this is a fantastic part of the sky, currently very well placed when it is dark and, as I hope I demonstrated recently on my 'Mexico Region' image of NGC7000, even zooming in on a small section of the nebulae in this region will yield some interesting results!

[RichieJarvis]

The North American nebula (Caldwell 20) shows up well on a Canon DSLR - Heres my image of that - exposure details are on the webpage - http://www.helkit.com/astro/nebula/c20.shtml

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Its a nice large object, so you can fill the FoV with it - however, for long the exposures you need to capture it, you are going to need to guide. Have you done guiding before?