Hi everybody, I've not been as active lately since I'm mostly waiting to purchase a larger CCD cam later in the year. However I always wanted to capture the faint ejecta around Eta Carinae and the Humunculus Nebula, since I didn't get it in my previous effort back in 2010 (see
http://www.iceinspace.com.au/forum/s...ad.php?t=56087), and thought this must be a good challenge for the ToUCam.
The difficulty in capturing this part of the nebula lies in overwhelming glare from Eta itself which drowns out the ejecta since it is so close to the star.
Image is available here:
http://upload.pbase.com/rolfolsen/im...66741/original
This time I tried taking longer subs with the 5x Powermate (@ f/25) but the results were just too blurry at that focal length and long exposure times. I then resorted to prime focus (wish I had a 2x Powermate...) and got a decent view of the ejecta which is visible around the Homunculus in the image.
There is a noticable colour difference between the Homunculus and the ejecta, with the ejecta having a much redder hue.
I blended my previous Homunculus image taken af f/25 over the new one of the ejecta to get a complete view of the fascinating structures in the area, hence the obvious difference in resolution. In the background are faint traces of the much larger Keyhole Nebula, especially to the upper right.
Hope you enjoy!
UPDATE: I have now, thanks to Mr. Sidonio's kind suggestions, managed to dig out some old data with longer exposure time and indeed found some further traces of the ejecta which I have blended into the image. The caption under the image is now updated to include all the 6 layers of varying exposure time that make up the image.