Monday 15 January 2018

IC5070 The Pelican nebula and IC1396 The Elephant trunk nebula.

IC5070 The Pelican nebula. This nebula lies in the constellation of Cygnus the Swan at a distance of about 1,800 light years, near NGC 7,000 The North America nebula. The sky conditions on this particular evening were very poor, it was hazy with a full moon, stars were only visible down to about magnitude 3.5. However narrowband CCD imaging was still possable. I was using my ten inch f/4.8 reflector with a Vixen Atlux mount, PHD auto guiding and an Atik 383L mono CCD camera.
I captured five minute sub frames with matching dark frames and combinded them with flat field frames to reduce the effect of vignetting in the final image. I used a set of Astronomik narrowband filters and used the Hubble palette for the colour data using SII for the red , H-alpha for the green and OIII for the blue channel . The total exposure times were 40 minutes for each filter.







IC1396 The Elephant trunk nebula. This dark nebula lies in the constellation of Cepheus the king at a distance of about 2,400 light years. I took this image under very clear, light polluted sky conditions with stars visable down to magnitude 5. I was using my ten inch f/4.8 reflector, a Vixen Atlux mount, PHD auto guiding and an Atik 383L mono CCD camera.
I captured five minute sub frames with matching dark frames and combinded them with flat field frames to reduce the effect of vignetting in the final image. The Hubble palette was used for the colour data using a set of Astronomik narrowband filters, SII , H-alpha and OIII filters. SII for the red channel, H-alpha for the green channel and OIII for the blue channel. The total exposure times for each filter was sixty minutes.