Back to the Lagoon Nebula. From my backyard, this nebula is only visible for a couple of hours at a time. During galaxy season, the 10" is on the mount when it's really too late in the morning to go after another galaxy. But the Milky Way is coming up over the trees about 3:30 am, and there we find this! Glowing hydrogen gas provides the red color, and oxygen the blue that whitens up the nebula in the brighter lower middle. Some blue may also be light reflected from the relatively new nearby stars.
This is also my first imaging run with the Astro-Tech Coma Corrector. It's taken me a while to fit it in with the camera setup, but it appears to work beautifully.
Telescope: Orion 10" f/4.7 Newtonian and ATCC (eff. at f/5.17)
Camera and Exposure: SXVF-H9C, 9x5'
Filter: IDAS-LPS2
Guiding: SX Lodestar and SX OAG
Mount: Takahashi NJP
Software: Nebulosity, Maxim DL, Photoshop CS3
Location: The Woodlands, TX
2 comments:
This is a really nice image. I'd like to see more of the surrounding area with this setup of yours! Have you ever considered going after the area around Antares and Rho Ophiuchi?
Oh, I'd love to get a bigger shot. I have this dream where I am in the desert with a very short refractor sometime in mid-summer. Basically, my camera chips are so small that I would have to build a mosaic, and that seems pointless when someone else's larger chip could bring it all home at once. Perhaps we should put your camera on the SV80ED.
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