Saturday 20 February 2016

The Orion Nebula

M42/43. The Orion nebula. This selection of images was taken using a composition of RGB filters combined with narrow band filters: HA, S11 and O111. The colours consists of green for the H Alpha channel , red for the S11 channel and blue for the O111 channel . I was using my ten inch reflector , PHD auto guiding and an Atik 383L mono CCD camera. I combined the data with matching dark frames and flat field frames to reduce the effect of vignetting in the final image . I also used a composition of exposure times to reveal the nebula's outer and core regions, using sixty second and five minute sub frames combined. The total exposure times were 30 minutes for each RGB colour channel and 40 minutes for each narrow band channel.


RGB

RGB colour, narrowband luminance

Mapped colour plus RGB

Mapped Hubble palette

Saturday 13 February 2016

M33 in Triangulum.

M33 in Triangulum. This galaxy is commonly named the pinwheel galaxy, it lies in the constellation of Triangulum at a distance of about three million light years. This image was taken using my ten inch F4.8 reflector, PHD auto guiding and an Atik 383L mono CCD camera.The sky conditions were very good on this particular evening with only light pollution to contend with. I captured five minute sub frames with matching dark frames and combined them with flat field frames to reduce the effect of vignetting in the final image. The total exposure times were 30 minutes using a red filter, 30 minutes using a green filter, 40 minutes using a blue filter and 40 minutes using a H-Alpha filter: