Michael A. Phillips' Astro Blog

Friday, January 1, 2010

Recent Deep-Sky Astronomy work

4 nights in December, most of which had bad seeing. 2 of them, I started with the CGE aligned and the white, 6" Schmidt-Newt on top and changed it out at midnight or later, in freezing temps (20*F) for the Orange 8" SCT. Phew. It wasn't very fruitful, but felt good to be able to field switch as the single armed fork C8i mount was still in the shop.

Ok, here's the totals:

4 nights
6 hr and 29 minutes of *Stacked* images represented here. Some were thrown away and or not processed yet!
I also got my dad some time on M31 with his Canon 50d at ISO 3200 :) - too bad the tracking wasn't better for ya dad!

M34:

M1:

M45:

Horsehead and Flame Nebulae - at a whopping 3.2 hours of stacked data! I'd like to add more to reduce the noise! Any tricks?! Lots of varied subs, but perhaps too long or too high an ISO?

I like it and it's perhaps my longest yet...