Accidental Wide Field of IC 405 & Co

[gorann]

Saturday nigh was the first clear night for what feels like eons and I fired up my triple rig (a Samyang 135 f/2, a Canon 300 f/4 and an ES127ED refractor, all connected to Canon 60D DSLRs) to collect as much entertainment as possible. I just "finished" processing the 300 mm data, which became an accidental mosaic since the framing on this lens shifted about 50% after the meridian flip at midnight (I only bothered to frame the refractor). The central 50% of the image contains data from both before and after the flip. No idea why it shifted but my rig is far prom perfected yet. The subs were stacked with Pixinsight and further processing was done in PS. SQM was only 20.5 (I usually get above 21) mainly due to a complete snow coverage lighting up the sky. Noise was low though due to natural cooling: the temperature fell from -7 to -14°C during the night and all my stuff were covered with frost.

134 x 3 min subs so 6.7 hours (Canon 300mm f/4 connected to a Canon 60D at ISO 1600)

Comments most welcome!

(Pixel peepers may be upset. I think I have some tilt in the Canon 300 / camera set up but I have no idea how to fix it so I have been fighting a bit with star shapes in this image - I will try stopping the lens down next time)

 

[MarsG76]

Cool looking wide field photo.

[andyo]

Yes very nice indeed. 

[wimvb]

Great "accident", Göran. I like it with that black border.

Btw, if you stop the lens down, you will get diffraction spikes. You could try using step down rings, or create a circular mask to put in front of the lens.

[gorann]

Just now, wimvb said:

Great "accident", Göran. I like it with that black border.

Btw, if you stop the lens down, you will get diffraction spikes. You could try using step down rings, or create a circular mask to put in front of the lens.

Thanks Wim!

Yes, black borders may be my contribution to astrophotography

[peter shah]

very nice work

[gorann]

1 hour ago, MarsG76 said:

Cool looking wide field photo.

Thanks Mars!

[gorann]

1 hour ago, andyo said:

Yes very nice indeed. 

Thanks Andy!

[gorann]

55 minutes ago, peter shah said:

very nice work

Thanks Peter!

[gorann]

My image was taken by an unmodded DSLR so the Ha signal is not very strong, so it is interesting to compare it to images with Ha added (which is in my plans to do). I found this very nice one by Scott Rosen from "Astronomers Do It In the Dark". Quite a bit more red nebulosity in there but in comparison I think my camera is picking up the blue dragon in the IC405 a bit better.

http://www.astronomersdoitinthedark.com/index.php?c=167&p=574

Scott's image is upside-down compared to mine so I take the liberty to turn it around for comparison

[StuartJPP]

Great stuff Göran,

Lucky accident and -14C...well luckily we don't have that too often in the UK...

[gorann]

6 minutes ago, StuartJPP said:

Great stuff Göran,

Lucky accident and -14C...well luckily we don't have that too often in the UK...

Thanks Stuart!

Good thing was that I could not find a single hot pixel in my subs, and we can take -14°C here in Scandinavia since (unlike UK) we do not have our water and sewage pipes on the outside our houses..... It is back up to 0°C now.

[MartinB]

That's a really interesting comparison Gorann and it goes to show the sort of result you can achieve when things aren't dominated by Ha - your colour is much better!  Food for thought. 

[gorann]

Thanks Martin!

Yes, apparently Ha can easily drown other colours but as it adds so much more detail to many images its is a very seductive wavelength to add to RGB images.

[tooth_dr]

Stunning image. 

[gorann]

1 hour ago, tooth_dr said:

Stunning image. 

Thanks a lot!

I just posted the first versions of the other Saturday night images from the rig:

Cheers

[swag72]

Very nice and such great framing  

[gorann]

1 hour ago, swag72 said:

Very nice and such great framing  

Thank you very much Sara, much appreciated