IC1396 - The Elephant's Trunk Nebula in Hydrogen-alpha

I had one galaxy project going on, but about 70% of moon made me take some Hydrogen-alpha images.

I aimed my set-up towards Elephant's Trunk Nebula which is a concentration of interstellar gas and dust in the star cluster IC 1396 and ionized gas region located in the constellation Cepheus about 2,400 light years away from Earth (wikipedia).

I took 10*1800 sec exposures, 5hr total. Here's quickly processed version.

DWB111; The Propeller Nebula

Another one taken with APM 80/500 triplet. This was also imaged in early March, but it took almost two weeks to process it. This can be found in constellation Cygnus.

Exposure of this HaRGB image is 9*1800 sec of Ha (bin1*1) and 6*450 sec of RGB (bin2*2). Total 6h45min.

Messier 53 with NGC5053

I wasn't satisfied with my EQ-6's performance with C8 so I changed to a smaller scope, APM 80/500.

Last week I took pictures of three different objects but hadn't had time to process them. These two globular clusters was a perfect shot for the short refractor. They can be found in constellation Coma Berenices.

Exposure of this LRGB image is 285:30:40:45 minutes.

NGC5033

Here's really late opening for this season... But better late than never!!

NGC 5033 (mag 10.8) is an inclined spiral galaxy located in the constellation Canes  Venatici. The galaxy has a very bright nucleus and a relatively faint disk. Significant warping is visible in the southern half of the disk.

Here's LRGB image with exposure of 375:35:30:50 minutes. Luminance binned 1*1 (10 to 15 min subs) and colors 2*2 (5min subs). Weather wasn't so good either, poor visibily with high clouds.

On Summer break...

No darkness here until August! 

But some plans are made already for the next season...

M86 and friends

I imaged this one at the end of March but the data was so poor that I almost threw everything away... There was quite a lot of high clouds which brought huge gradients to all channels.

Here's 2h of luminance and 20:30:30 min of RGB.

Arp 188 final

I decided to end the season 2009-2010 with this one so I gave it more light. Last two nights I took some more blue and quite a lot of Luminance.

So here it is!!

This one has 7h 20min (22*20min) of Luminance and 2h 35min of RGB (50:50:55 binned 2*2, 5min subs).


I added all the luminance data to next one and processed that without deconvolution which gave much softer result. This one has 11h 10min of luminance and 2h 35min RGB.

I'm not sure which one is better so I let viewer to decide...