I have been lucky to have two clear nights on the trot and since my neighbours have chopped their tree back I can shoot the northern skies earlier in the year, as the moon is back I thought I would get back to my preferred imaging of narrow band and have a crack at a close up of the Elephants Trunk nebula even though it is still quite low in the sky from where I live at this time of year. I did 4 hours of Ha data on Thursday and managed 5 hours of OIII last night. This was taken with the Takahashi FSQ106ED at f5 and Starlight Xpress SXVF H9 (a great camera considering its small chip size, relatively low pixel count and no set point cooling). All sub frames are 30 minutes and auto guiding was done with a lodestar and OAG using dithering, I used 5 second guiding exposures. The processing is basically multiple iterations of levels followed by several contrast curves (slight 'S' shaped curves. A final shadows/highlights adjustment was made and colour adfjustments made to tone the bright reds down. No sharpening filters or noise reduction was used. All raw frames were calibrated with darks and dark subtracted flats. I will be adding the SII data at the earliest opportunity. The Ha channel can be seen on the 'Nebulae 2' page of the image gallery of my website http://www.imagingtheheavens.co.uk as well as a previous HST version of this subject taken with the BRC-250.
A full size high resolution image can be seen at the following link http://www.pbase.com/image/134691156/original
Now that the summer nebulae are starting to appear the majority of my imaging will be narrow band until next March
Thanks for looking
Best wishes
Gordon
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