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Sunday, June 5, 2011

North America Nebula

Here's the other shot from Thursday night.10 x 5min exposures.

Saturday, June 4, 2011

The E nebula

This dark nebula Barnard 142/143 is just north west of Altair.
15x5min  at 1600iso on the 70mm apo with darks, flats + bias. I'm sure my image calibration isn't great but I think it's a lot better than with nothing.
I (obviously) expose the lights. I am imaging with the apt software. The free version is great. PHD is working fine now with a 400mm f6.3 telephoto lens. (It's well strapped down so there's no differential flexure.
I go indoors and connect my laptop via Tight VNC using a via mains network system and can view the frames as they appear. Same for the PHD graph.
At the end of the session I put on the lens cap. Start the series of dark frames and then leave the dome & go to bed. I'm using a power pack with an Astronomiser dummy battery pack so there's enough juice to do the work.
Next day I do the flats (using the sky at the moment, but I'm making a (some) lightbox. People say that if you do flats then you must do bias frames so I do. I just do some frames with lenscap on and zero exposure (actually 1/4000s).
I then plug it all into Deep Sky Stacker and see what happens.

Friday, June 3, 2011

Cocoon Nebula IC 5146

18x 5min. darks flats bias frames.
70mm f6 ed