Hoegaarden Astronomy & Photography
Imaging over two nights in April, 314 frames were colelcted, 101 frames 120″ and 212 frames 60″ at Gain 100.
This gain value did not raise up to expectations, I could see more noise in the end result easily. Compared to what I’m used to at Gain 0 with this camera.
Or actually maybe more still a foetus, as the Soul nebula is often seen as a foetus or a little bear. Imagination! I’ve never seen a Soul in it: how does a soul look like anyhow?
The frames were taken last week Tuesday, in horrible conditions: high clouds, fog, and tons of moisture. Frames were whitened out by the fog, and all street lighting reflecting on the fog.
The image is a mosaic, about 6000×7400 pixels. More then 7 panels were composed with APP to create it. However, due to the fog, soo many gradients were present, I really had to get all tricks out of my sleeves to get a decent picture. It was processed with all parameters in APP at max (Normalisation, blending) and also cropped the outer edges which could not be salvaged. Material used was: Nikon D750, no filters, EQ8; Esprit120, 400mm guidelens with an ASI290MM
Also to be seen at Astrobin
The Heart Nebula in Perseus is an interesting region of red hydrogen clouds mixed with dark nebulosity and bright star clusters. This was a test-run: first light with the Sequence generator Pro combined with the Nikon D750 (with autofocus by PegasusAstro, worked wonderfull). Second test (living dangerously!): first attempt to mosaic automatically with SGP.
The D750 would crash SGP when hitting the “link” button: as soon as I touched that button, SGP would collapse and simply vanish in thin air. Solution: install the 2013 C++ redistributables.
The Optolong Pro filter OR the reducer/flattener (or the combination) imho added a lot of vignetting and uneven illumination to the image, which I had a hard time eliminating. So next test would be with a regular Nikon T-ring. If that does not solve the issue then it must be the F5 reducer. I noticed earlier already that images at F7 with the Nikon were a lot cleaner.
IC1805 or the Heart Nebula in Perseus. Image dedicated to my mom who passed way in September age 79.
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