Hi all,
Had another clear night yesterday, but with additional challenge from the full moon while embarking on the Eta Carine imaging mosaic project!
This time, data from the top and bottom parts of the nebula (top and bottom here refers to left and right from the perspective of the mosaic image listed below) were collected until about 1AM. Started the session earlier this time, around 10PM plus. Transparency was about the same as the night before, but there were intermittent passing culumus clouds (small ones). In all, this is a current 9-panel mosaic, which means 9 subframes were used to piece together to form the overall image. Each of this subframe in turn is made up of 3 subexposure frames, totalling 270 minutes in all spent on exposing the CCD for this project, or 4.5 hours. All taken through the H-alpha filter as before and each subexposure frame duration being 10 minutes. It was tougher this time to piece the top and bottom parts together since the previous central region was taken the night before, and alignment-rotation situation has changed. Nevertheless, more time was spent aligning and rotating, and also making sure that seams are not visible (various panels had different brightness tones). Another project that lasted till 4AM. (yawn).
Right now, two versions are presented as follows: the low-res version is to give the viewer an overall appearance of the nebula without scrolling, and the high-res version lets the viewer see the details of the nebula. Actually, the original version on my disk is almost in turn about 3-4 times bigger than this high-res version, but it is about 43MB and tough to get it up on the web server especially for geocities, and i think everyone will get impatient downloading it. Nevertheless, the current mosaic dimension is enough to print on 10R photographic paper or around 6 X 13 inches. There are plans to further include the full extent of nebulosity in the nebula complex to make the overall image more squarish, but that would mean another 6 panels additional, 3 on each side! -> another 180 minutes worth of exposure.
Enough of rambling, here goes:
Low-res Version
http://www.geocities.com/remuscj/imaged ... maller.jpg
High-res Version
http://www.geocities.com/remuscj/imaged ... dsmall.jpg
Time to rest!
Eta Carinae CCD Mosaic: Singapore!
You are really good at making mosaic and image processing!! Good job!!
"The universe is composed mainly of hydrogen and ignorance." 
Just seeing how he captured Jupiter using a webcam+SCT amazed me ... the way he did the settings and stuff. 
Yeah.. got this msg also... prob have to wait a while before I try again.ariefm71 wrote:I've got "Sorry, this GeoCities site is currently unavailable" when clicking the links. Anyone having the same problem?
[80% Steve, 20% Alfred] ------- Probability of Clear Skies = (Age of newest equipment in days) / [(Number of observers) * (Total Aperture of all telescopes present in mm)]
