Another
fantastic night of imaging! When I first
got out there at 7, there were some thin, high clouds, so I got everything put
back together and then waited till they cleared out. I discovered that Photoshop has a mosaicking
tool called Photomerge in the Automate menu, and I saw some evidence online
that it will do oddly-oriented and oddly-paneled astroimages, so I decided to
try a 6-panel mosaic on M31! Since I
still wanted to image nebulae in the Orion complex too when it came up, and
because of the late start, I decided just to do 10x3 minute images for each
panel, for a total of three hours. I
wound up having to do a meridian flip halfway through, but thankfully it
happened to be just as I finished the top half of the image, so I didn’t have
to think too hard to get it lined back up again on the other side. Also, I’m glad it’s so bright – my test
images to align it the way I wanted were only 15s long, just enough to see the
core.
Well, it almost worked...I seem to have a missing panel...
After that was done, I took a
stack of 10x5 minute images on the Flame Nebula, up right next to the Horsehead
Nebula, which is right next to the easternmost star of Orion’s Belt, Altinak. I put the nebula up near the top of the frame
so that Altinak wouldn’t just totally bloom and cause reflections and lens
flare and stuff, so I just cropped out the emptiness as the bottom. It came out pretty well, if still noisy.
NGC 2024 Flame Nebula, Nikon D5300 on my C11, f/6.3 focal reducer, Orion Skyglow filter
Guiding: QHY5 on Orion ST-80
8x300s, ISO-3200
I left about 2:30 AM so that I
wouldn’t have two completely sleep-deprived nights in a row! Also it was cold. Also club member Will and I were the only ones left, and
Will had to leave at 2. He collected RGB
data for his awesome monochrome Andromeda image.
Daylight Savings Time ended that
night, and I was worried that stuff might break, but the only thing that
semi-broke was BackyardNikon; it was partway into a 300s exposure at 2 AM, and
then it jumped back to -3600 seconds and was counting up from there
instead. So I just aborted it and re-started. I’ll submit a bug report sometime this week.
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