Two from last night

[petevasey]

IC 426 is a small reflection nebula tucked away in Orion just above the 'belt', and generally overlooked in favour of its more famous neighbours. A rare(!) clear night was forecast for last night 4th February, so I took the opportunity to visit this attractive object. Orion is relatively low in the sky for me, and unfortunately I had equipment problems so did not capture as much data as I would have liked. But it will have to do for now - not much prospect of a clear sky the next few nights, and then I have a hip replacement operation scheduled which will put me out of action for a few weeks.

QSI 683wsg on RC10 with SX AO unit. Luminance 7 x 10 minutes, RGB each 4 x 10 minutes all binned 2x2.  Don't ask where the extra star spikes came from - a similar thing happened a couple of years ago and is still a mystery!  As you see the M95 image immediately following had the normal complement of spikes!

As Orion sank into the murk, I then turned my attention to Messier 95 barred galaxy in Leo. I had captured a monochrome image in 2008, but felt it deserved some colour attention. Unfortunately data capture was cut short by cloud cover, but I got just about enough for a reasonable image.of this relatively bright object. Optics as above, luminance 9 x 10 minutes, RGB each 4 x 10 minutes all binned 2x2.

Cheers,

Peter

 

[Demonperformer]

Very worthwhile effort, I would say.

Hope all goes well with the surgery.

[Cyclops]

Nice pair of images. Good luck with the op!