Hi guys
Long time since my last image post, 4 months I think? Life has had its road spikes chucked out under my feet so sorry for my absence.
Anyway, here is last weekends effort on the Tarantula Nebula region of the LMC.
I managed to get a totally clear night from dusk till dawn last Saturday night, shame a 70% moon rose around midnight though. Given the LMC was cullminationg around 10pm'ish I decided to point at it for a few hours once it got dark. The seeing was quite good for Newcastle but being in the direction of the significant Newcastle light dome, gradients were a hassle later in the session for the Red Green and particularly Blue shots
(oh sigh.. to have a one shot DSLR....) but I tried not to over process, a look gradient removal filters tend to give if you aren't careful, playing conservative with gradient removal and I think the results are acceptable..?
The seeing was quite good initially but improved to excellent as the evening wore on. I also shot the Lum and Ha while the region was at its higher altitude above the horizon so as to get the best possible resolution and I think this paid off..? As usual, I have pushed the data a bit at times and thus walked the tightrope between extracting detail and increasing noise
It was a balmy summer night with the ambient air temp at 24C for the first sub frame and droping to about 19C by the last several hours later. This was a good night to be thankfull for the super cooling capablities of the FLI camera which can cool the chip some 60C below the ambient temp so I still managed to image at a chip temp of -35C all night, this allowed me to keep using the one and only set of 10min darks I've ever taken (Mr Lazy) ...and stay in my shorts and T-shirt till dawn
....a few mozies though
I have provided links below to a few different versions of the data and each image is between 1 and 2 meg in size so may take some time to download on dial up (like I have...DOH!!) with broadband you will have no worries
Hope you like'em
HaRGB full frame:
http://www.pbase.com/strongmanmike20...57472/original
HaRGB cropped close up taken from full frame image:
http://www.pbase.com/strongmanmike20...58914/original
LHaRGB Full frame:
http://www.pbase.com/strongmanmike20...59844/original
Halpha only full frame:
http://www.pbase.com/strongmanmike20...11408/original
Luminance (Luminance+Halpha+Red = 3hrs):
http://www.pbase.com/strongmanmike20...39014/original
For those of you who aren't familiar with my setup here it is:
http://www.pbase.com/strongmanmike20...03751/original
Hope it isn't as long till the next image
Mike