Here's my first guided stack of M8. I tried to make it red, but the best I can do is pink. I wouldn't feel right colorising it or just cranking up the red channel. The unmodded 350D is just very sensitive to green and blue (H beta and OIII) and is nowhere near as sensitive to H alpha. It's got me thinking the Hutech mod is in my near future, however the flip-side of the coin is I've got a camera that's behaves like its got a built in OIII and H beta filter. Maybe if I started with a modded camera I'd be yearning now for an unmodded one to show off all that lovely H beta and OIII...
This shot is a guided stack of 7 x 4 minute exposures at ISO800. Normally I shoot at ISO1600, but expert opinion asserts that ISO800 will yield an overall higher signal to noise ratio. Anyhow for a 28 minute stack it looks okay. I like being able to see the detail in the heart of the nebula. Modern equipment is pretty damn cool.
For this stack I used the new Orion 80ED, which has been a little bit of a disappointment for me. While I love its wide field it suffers badly from field curvature, so you don't really get use of the full field. It's a good deal more of a problem than in my SN-8 which now has almost no field curvature thanks to the Baader MPCC coma corrector. Now I'll have to buy a field flattener for the ED80...
A larger version is here (290KBytes)
