M42 from the balcony

[orly_andico]

Decided to stop obsessing over periodic error and actually take some photos.

Ended up not sleeping last night, try as I might I could not recover the Flaming Star Nebula (IC405) with 55 minutes total exposure.

By 5 a.m. the Orion Nebula had crossed the meridian and had (barely) cleared the roof of the balcony. Here's my first attempt:



This is 1x 5 minutes, 1x 10 minutes, and 1x 20 minutes with an Orion 100ED with William-Optics 0.8X FR/FF (the old one for 66mm APO), IDAS LPS-V4 "poor man's narrowband" filter, and QHY8.

Can't figure out why all the colors are gone. The LPS-V4 has two passbands, one at O-III and one at H-a. Each passband is 20nm wide. It's a very aggressive filter, almost as aggressive as a true narrowband. I could go 20-minute subs without saturating the sky background.

[orly_andico]

This is 1x 5 minutes, 3x 10 minutes, and 1x 20 minutes of IC405, the Flaming Star Nebula.

IC405 is a reflection nebula and should be around the 2 bright stars in the middle-left of this image. However I see nothing, except (with some imagination) what seems to be some filaments of material. Anybody else see it?

[Gary]

Nice attempts! Thanks for sharing.

Not imagination, I saw the filaments too. It looks like small broken strands of m-shaped maggi mee.

After seeing them, I check with the following APOD version to triple confirm it is not my imagination.

http://apod.nasa.gov/apod/ap031124.html (rotate this image upside down for better orientation when comparing side by side)