Petri Kehusmaa Astroblog

I’m going through my old images and reprocessing them with new tricks I’ve learned after watching Adam Block’s DVD. Here is M42 from last year.

This nebula is very hard to image at these latitudes where it rise only about 15 degrees above horizon and summer night skies are still very pale. Anyway, I gave it a try and somehow succeeded to have even colors. The blue channel images were almost unusable but I managed to get something out of them. Imaged with 8″ SCT and STL-11000. Total exposure 160 minutes.

I combined my latest image with earlier M42 image and was able to get total of 3.5 hours of exposure. This is the result and will be my final for season 2007-2008. Next time I will return to this on November.

Rainy days might be rewarding after all. I had some time to browse through my image directories and found 1 minute sub exposures taken on January. I put them together (HaRGB) and here is the result. Total exposure time is 50 minutes. More details in my image gallery (click image).

There were still some unprocessed images on hard disk. These frames were taken on 5th of Jan. There is total of 50 minutes of Ha data.

I found some unprocessed images of Rosette nebula and combined them with my earlier images from december. The result is 2.5 hours of Ha-data and 4.6 hours of HaRGB (second image).

Last night I was able to image RGB-data for Rosette and here is the result.

This is my very first image of Rosette Nebula. This image was taken by automated imaging session where CCDCommander was controlling my dome, mount, focuser, cloud sensor and two CCD cameras. Everything went well and this is just one of my targets from last night. Total length of my automated imaging session was 10 hours!! How great is that!

I will continue to image this great nebula and will add the results here when available. Image details available here.

This is a 40 minutes exposure with Baader 7 nm  H-alpha filter and SBIG STL11000M-C2. Weather was poor with high clouds and mist. I had to stop imaging when heavy clouds arrived. I will continue to pursue more Ha and RGB data when weather allows.

This is the start of my ‘Bubble Nebula Wide Field’ -project. My goal is to take very long Ha exposure and at least 1 hour of each color channel (RGB). This is 170 minutes of Ha. Taken with TMB80 APO with TV 0.8 fr/ff and STL-11K-C2 CCD.