
Category Archives: Nebulae
North America Nebula and Pelican Nebula Mosaic Preview

Above is the start of the mosaic. 3 Panels that will probably be six before it is all said and done. Below is just the North America Part, unfinished since I need to get the top of the nebula. Click to see it at 50% of the full resolution.

The Great Orion Nebula, M42
Gamma Cas and The Ghost Nebula
Monkey Head Nebula In 40 Minutes
Running Man Nebula and The Orion Nebula Mosaic

Gain was too high for this project. The over-saturated areas caused column/row artifacts which created dark horizontal bands on either side of the brightest part of the core. It was difficult to deal with in post-processing. Next time, I want to try some low-gain, longer exposures instead to see if the banding problem goes away.
For fun, I combined this image with my M42 project image that included all my best data to date. Here is the results of that mix:

The Pelican Nebula from the City
Pickering’s Triangle on Nov 18, 2020
Thor’s Helmet

“Thor’s Helmet,” aka NGC 2359. First time I ever shot this with any camera. For years I’ve passed this guy up for bigger or better objects nearby, but not on this night. It was a main goal for this night’s imaging session. It did not get high enough to image until 2:00 am here and I took a nap as soon as I started it going. Luckily, I got enough data before sunrise to make a half-decent final image
UPDATE Nov 13, 2020:
More time added with 30×120 sec sub-images at Gain 20, offset 200 to the above. Total time 3 hrs, 22 min.

Horse Head and Flame Nebula in Full Moon Conditions

I was killing time while waiting for Thor’s Helmet to get into position, so I shot the Horsehead and Flame Nebula region. I used Fitsworks to crop out the dithering artifacts and set a black point and do the initial color balance. Photoshop and some hue and saturation adjustments to finish it off. Then, one pass with color blotch action and one horizontal banding removal action later and this is how it came out. A few other tweaks were done, too. Not too bad for the minimal effort and a full moon night.





