On December 10th, 2011, I woke up at 4:45am, loaded my mount, Canon camera and the FS152 in the car and headed to the Windy Hill area in Skyline Boulevard.

My original plan was driving to San Francisco and hopefully catch a wide view of the Moon during totality with the Golden Gate bridge in the foregraound, but unfortunately, I didn't get up early enough, so I went for Plan B (Skyline).

Once there, by the road, there were a few cars from people who had also got up early (or simply hadn't gone to bed yet) to catch a glimpse of the eclipse.

I mounted the stuff,not even sure if I'd be able to reach focus with the adapters Ibrought with me (I had never put the Canon on the FS152).I didn't power up the mount, so I pointed at the Moon manually, gotfocus swapping adapters after a few "oh shut..." and captured a few shots of the eclipse.

I made however one bBig mistake: I didn't realize I was shooting at the highest ISO of thecamera, so noise was bad.... Because of that, and also because of the very low altitude of the Moon during totality (barely 10-15 degrees above the horizon), the image could not stand any deconvolution, so what you see is the image pretty much as it came out of the camera.

After totality and as the Moon was about to disappear behind a hill, Itook the camera out of the scope, did and shared some visual views,put the camera on a tripod with a camera lens, and shot this one:

Unimpressive, and not nearly as sexy as having the Golden Gate bridge or someother cool land features, but the whole event was fun and I had someinteresting talk with the folks that also went up there to watch theeclipse (and who were rather impressed with that big scope the FS152is :-). As one friend said, rather than a great picture, it's just a testimonial image: I was there, and this is the souvenir that I took with me. That's all!

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DATE December 10th, 2011 PHOTO Exposure: L: 1 x 0.3' Total: 0.3 seconds Focal: 1200mm

EQUIPMENT Imaging Scope: Takahashi FS-152 Camera: Canon 40D Mount: EM-400

SITE & CONDITIONS Skyline Highway 35, California Seeing: Poor Transparency: Poor SOFTWARE Processing: None

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Simeis 147, a supernova remnant also known as Sharpless 2-240, is an object typically photographed with narrowband filters, because under visible light it just appears too "poor" in comparison, mainly due to the fact that this object is extremely faint when imaged through RGB filters - and not too bright when using narrowband filters either! Narrowband data however deprives us from viewing the many other things happening around it.

Most narrowband+broadband compositions I've seen (usually H-Alpha + RGB or H-Alpha + LRGB) haven't been able to "fix" that, so I decided to give it a try, also expanding the typical already-wide FOV, to hopefully capture and visually document more of what's around.

The image being presented above includes the entire field I photographed, in a 3x1 mosaic, but down here you can see a composition that focuses on the supernova remnant itself:

Successfully combining narrowband data (H-Alpha in this case) and (L)RGB data can be tricky. One of the usual results is that, since H-Alpha data tends to produce very small stars, when combined with broadband data, the resulting image often presents a rather severe ringing around the stars. Also, some conventional techniques rely on mixing H-Alpha with the red (R) and blue (B) data, but in this case, my RGB data was rather poor so I couldn't rely on just this technique. Therefore, for this particular image I followed a number of conventional as well as non-conventional methods that proved to be rather successful in producing an image that visually documents this area of the sky. Also, as usual in many of my recent images, a multi-scale approach dominated post-processing, in particular to bring out the fainter details that hide behind the swarm of stars.

My daughter says this supernova remnant looks like a Christmas tree ornament, although I kind of see a piggy's head instead! :-)

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DATE November, 2011 PHOTO Exposure: 3 panes mosaic for LRGB: L: 6 x 10', RGB: 6x5' each, 3 panes mosaic for H-Alpha: All combined 56 x 15' Total: 21.5 hours Focal: 385mm, f/3.6

EQUIPMENT Imaging Scope: FSQ 106 EDX w/Reducer Camera: STL11k Guide Camera: StarShoot Autoguider Mount: EM-400

SITE & CONDITIONS Henry Coe State Park, DARC Observatory and Montebello OSP, California Seeing: Extremely poor Transparency: Average SOFTWARE Calibration/Registration/Stacking: PixInsight Post-Processing: PixInsight & Photoshop