COMMENTS
I went to Montebello to try the Powermate x4 on a brigh object. This was the first time I was going to image with the x4 barlow. I wasn't sure what was going to come up at f/21.6 through my small 4" NP101!!

But anyway, I planned to image the Trifid Nebula (M20), however when I went to TheSky to point the scope to M20, I actually entered M8 (Lagoon Nebula). Not noticing my mistake I started imaging the Lagoon. And I only realized my mistake when I came home and opened one of the raw images. I was like "wait a minute, I know this fella and she's no trifid. That's the lagoon!!"

This actually explains the "unusual" framing of the object: since I assumed I was imaging the Trifid (a round nebula), for framing I took a quick 30 seconds exposure, made sure the brightest area was in the center - it didn't look like the Trifid, but again, after 30 seconds I wasn't expecting any defining attributes - and started shooting.

PS: The image you see above is a post-processing done on October 18th,2008

COMMENTS
The night of July 26-27 I went to the Lick Observatory as a volunteer for their Public Music event. I was the only one out of 8 amateur astronomers doing imaging, but that was actually cool. While the visitors had fun peeking at the other people's scopes, they asked questions about how to take photos of nebulas and deep sky objects.

I spent the night imaging only the Eagle nebula - I figured I'd choose a famous and bright object, so I'd have something to show on the screen on my red-filtered laptop from just one raw image - which I did and it looked pretty nice.

This image is one of two (the other one is here) resulting from the processing. While on the other version I forced certain crhomatic ranges to become yellowish, this is the "natural color" image. Some people say that the center of the nebula is too pink in this image, but the processing of this image, as far as color goes, it only involved some general curve adjustments. It was during one of those eadjusments that the pink came up stronger, just like the area surrounding the center came up orange-brown, while the rest remained reddish. Considering no color replacement was involved, if anything, this shows that either these different emmission areas do produce colors slightly different, or that my camera was capturing a mix of tones, due perhaps to its particular sensitivity (or lack of) to H-Alpha emmissions. Or whatever. I'm not an expert :-)

COMMENTS
The night of July 26-27 I went to the Lick Observatory as a volunteer for their Public Music event. I was the only one out of 8 amateur astronomers doing imaging, but that was actually cool. While the visitors had fun peeking at the other people's scopes, they asked questions about how to take photos of nebulas and deep sky objects.

I spent the night imaging only the Eagle nebula - I figured I'd choose a famous and bright object, so I'd have something to show on the screen on my red-filtered laptop from just one raw image - which I did and it looked pretty nice.

This image is one of two (the other one is here) resulting from the processing. Here I forced certain crhomatic ranges to become yellowish, giving the image a nice (but false) narrobanding effect. Please note that I have not painted the photo!! It was all done by adjusting the curves of certain chromatic ranges, that's all. I don't really like to transform colors - I'd much rather show what the camera gives, but this was more of an experiment than anything else. Visually I think it came up beautifully, though, but again, you won't see me doing this very often, if at all.

COMMENTS
This is one of my first H-Alpha images. Something went wrong during the stacking process that left the resulting image in that "shaky" state. I'll probably try to stack it using MaximDL or CCDStack and see if things improve. I don't really dislike that uninvited effect, other than it leaves the image ressembling a painting more than a photography. It was comforting however to see how much H-Alpha can the modified 40D capture. With an unmodified DSRL this would have been impossible.

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The bubble nebula is an object I like a lot. Two problems with it. First, it's not particularly bright (depnding how you measure it, of course). Second, it's rather small, so at a focal length of 540mm it barely takes up more than 5% of the entire field of view.

For that reason this is a target I'll probably try in the future with the Powermate x4 barlow, though I'm worried the increase in focal ratio might make it a hard target to catch as it'd need too much exposure in order to capture details (update: it's done and my fears came true).

An odd problem with this image is with the stars at the bottom, right of M52. Notice in the original size image how the red and blue tones are not properly aligned in that area. This wasn't an optical problem but a stacking issue (one more reason to stop using DeepSkyStacker?), as the original raw images did not show this problem. Another issue is with the corners. Notice how the stars at the corners are stretched paralell to the center (that is, not pointing at or away from the center). This is certainly NOT field rotation, and my guess is that it's due to the camera not being right on axis with the scope, perhaps due to one of the adapters not being inserted exactly in line with the rest.

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This is my very first H-Alpha image, and also my first "official" image taken with the ST2k. Not particularly comforting to use a one-shot color camera to take H-Alpha images, but hey, that's all I had! (plus the 40D which is also one-shot color of course). Focusing can certainly be improved, and the fact that I used a 1.25" h-Alpha filter created some terrible vignetting I had to correct using the DBE tool from PixInsight. Like most of my images, I plan to revisit this object in the future when I hopefully have better skills.

COMMENTS
A crappy Pelican. Underexposed and heavily processed to calm the noise down. Not much more to say about this one. I had great skies, but before settling for the pelican I ran into numerous problems as I was trying to do some imaging with my C11, that I finally had to give up, so I pointed the scope to the pelican with the NP101, mainly so I would at least get "something". And something I've got, but that's about it.

COMMENTS
This is probably the best image I took from the GSSP adventure. Even so, I'm not very happy with the results. A bit out of focus (or too much NR during processing... or both!), too little exposure time (4 shots only? you've got to be kidding me!). As a result, I went a bit too aggresive with the processing and the stars took over the image. Granted, this field is packed with stars, one more reason to be a bit more dilligent with the processing as well as taking more images to keep the noise down and have more freedom when it's time to process it.

Soon enough I'll attack this object again, perhaps even attempting a wider field with the 0.8 reducer, and actually get in the picture both sides of the veil (east and west). We'll see...