Horsehead Nebula
Nov 5, 2019 13:55:36 #
Ballard
Loc: Grass Valley, California
The other night I took 20 exposures at 4 minutes each of the horsehead nebula at a 1000mm focal length (F 8.0) with a canon DSLR. There was a bit of haze in the air and the atmosphere was somewhat turbulent. It came out OK. But I believe more frames and a better night will bring out more of the surrounding nebula and crisp it up a bit. All comments and suggestions are welcome.
Nov 5, 2019 13:59:35 #
Ballard wrote:
The other night I took 20 exposures at 4 minutes each of the horsehead nebula at a 1000mm focal length (F 8.0) with a canon DSLR. There was a bit of haze in the air and the atmosphere was somewhat turbulent. It came out OK. But I believe more frames and a better night will bring out more of the surrounding nebula and crisp it up a bit. All comments and suggestions are welcome.
Very impressive.
Nov 5, 2019 14:27:42 #
Nice photo, what is that thing in the middle that looks like the head of a sea horse?
Nov 5, 2019 14:36:17 #
Nov 5, 2019 14:39:36 #
Wow! Fantastic photo! I know how difficult it is to get these great results! Nice job!
Nov 5, 2019 15:04:42 #
[quote=Ballard]The other night I took 20 exposures at 4 minutes each of the horsehead nebula ...
Great photo. Are those the natural colors you get at 1000mm.
Great photo. Are those the natural colors you get at 1000mm.
Nov 5, 2019 15:10:26 #
Nov 5, 2019 15:52:29 #
Ballard
Loc: Grass Valley, California
[quote=emmons267]
They are the natural colors. However I did saturate a bit.
Ballard wrote:
The other night I took 20 exposures at 4 minutes each of the horsehead nebula ...
Great photo. Are those the natural colors you get at 1000mm.
Great photo. Are those the natural colors you get at 1000mm.
They are the natural colors. However I did saturate a bit.
Nov 5, 2019 15:55:11 #
Ballard wrote:
They are the natural colors. However I did saturate a bit.
I never realized you could capture those colors. Thanks.
Happy trails
Nov 5, 2019 16:17:50 #
Nov 5, 2019 17:56:37 #
Ballard
Loc: Grass Valley, California
Ched49 wrote:
Nice photo, what is that thing in the middle that looks like the head of a sea horse?
The horsehead is actually a lot of dust 1500 light years away and is back illuminated by hydrogen gas that has been ionized by the star sigma Orionis. Sigma Orionis is the second brightest star in the photo and is above and slightly right of the horsehead. The brightest star in the picture is Alnitak (which is the left most star in the belt of Orion as viewed from the northern hemisphere). I noticed that I screwed up when removing a satellite trail with the clone tool and added what appears to be a slightly elongated star to the image that really doesn't exist. My booboo is inline with Sigma Orionis and the horsehead and not quite half way between them.
Nov 5, 2019 21:09:34 #
Ballard wrote:
The horsehead is actually a lot of dust 1500 light... (show quote)
Thanks, not only you take great photo's of the universe, you know a lot about it.
Nov 5, 2019 21:17:30 #
Nov 6, 2019 02:16:57 #
Ballard
Loc: Grass Valley, California
TriX wrote:
Wow! Beautiful shot. What did you use for tracking?
For these shots I had the camera and lens piggybacked on an APO refractor. The refractor was mounted in a Losemandy G11 mount that I upgraded to use DC servos with a Gemini 2 controller. To guide the exposures I used a laptop computer running the freeware PHD telescope control software. The laptop was connected to a Starlight Express Lodestar X2 ccd via a USB cable (this also supplied the power to the CCD) and the ccd was plugged into the eyepiece hold of the APO refractor. The laptop was connected to the Gemini 2 controller via and Ethernet cable so the software could control the mount based a star that the CCD was looking at. The laptop was also connected to the DSLR via another USB port and was also running the Canon EOS software to control the DLSR. In order to keep warm I remote mounted the laptop with a Desktop computer in my office. In this way I could control the everything from inside the house once I had the camera manually focused (Autofocus doesn't work in this low light conditions).
Nov 6, 2019 05:38:10 #
srscary
Loc: Cary, NC
Very impressive astrophotography. I have seen shots like these in the past only in NASA's astronomy picture of the day site.
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