Far out! Another astrophoto

[ajeff]

Shot this 8/28/08, after fighting with gear, mainly the autoguider I only managed to get 6 half way usable shots. Since the autoguider was acting up, this resulted in trails, lack of sub exposures, and a headache. I used a modified canon 20D (the aggressive stock IR filter has been removed and replaced) To control light pollution, a hydrogen alpha filter was placed in front of the mirror box behind the lens (works great, I can use all my lenses and telescope)

I piggybacked the camera on the telescope, taking 2 minute exposures with a canon 70-200mm f/4L lens stopped down to f/5.6 The lens was zoomed in to 200mm.

The images was converted to tiff files then loaded into photoshop where I split the channels, tossed the blue and green channels since there was no data, then stacked the red channels on top of each other setting the opacity of each layer to allow the each bottom layer show through while at the same time eliminating some of the noise. Whew!

I still think I need to reprocess.

Since the file is pretty large, I will provide a link:

http://home.comcast.net/~slitherjef/...to/sm7000a.jpg

The nebulas catalogs are NGC7000 (also called the North America Nebula - bottom left side) And IC5070 (also called the Pelican Nebula - top right side) Splitting the two nebulas is a dark nebula with the catalog number of LDN 935, which can be seen in better photographs then I just posted

Enjoy

BTW, I posted a wider photo of this area a couple weeks ago in color

[Shadera]

That's really beautiful. I've been thinking about getting a telescope so I can start stargazing. Can you recommend some pointers for newbies? A trip to the top of Mauna Kea and seeing some of the images and work done there really were inspiring.

[ajeff]

That's really beautiful. I've been thinking about getting a telescope so I can start stargazing. Can you recommend some pointers for newbies? A trip to the top of Mauna Kea and seeing some of the images and work done there really were inspiring.

Thanks.
As far as recomending a starter scope, there are a lot of options and alot comes down to how dark your skies are, what you want to look at and how much you are willing to spend and so on.

I will PM you a couple links that you may be interested in