New Year's Eve was a rare clear night here in Melbourne. I had been at my daughter's house for dinner but when I got home I thought I'd try something outside the box. I wanted to try the Horsehead and Flame nebulas with my Planetary cameras. The moon was going to rise at about 11.00 pm so I started with the ASI224MC for some RGB data. I then followed on with a bit of Ha using a ASI120MMS once the moon rose.
To fit these two iconic nebulas on the tiny chips together, I couldn't use anything greater in focal length than 200mm. I grabbed my iOptron Sky Tracker and attached the 224 onto this 40 year old Sun branded camera lens. The aperture ring of this lens is actually stuck wide open at a fairly generous f 2.8 but with the 2 inch filters I had adapted to fit on the front, it probably brought it down to about f 4.
Anyway, once the 25 mins of 1 min colour data using an IR cut filter was shot, I swapped the 224 for the 120, refocused on Alnitak and shot 24 mins of 2.5 and 3 min exposures with the Ha filter. Unfortunately changing cameras and focus rotated the image slightly but I was able to adjust that in post processing. I shot the whole lot unguided using ASICAP on my Mobile Phone. I had to guess where to point the camera lens and just sight Alnitak from behind the camera and hope for the best. After afew adjustments I got it close enough to fit in both nebulas. A rather weird thing to try but I like mucking around to see what I can get out of cheap equipment. Everything I used had been bought secondhand, including the Mobile Phone!
I replaced the red channel (which was way out of focus) from the RGB data with the Ha data, then also used the Ha as a luminance layer. I was happy my New Years Eve experiment worked well enough to captue a reasonable amount of detail, albeit with a fair bit of running and thermal noise to not want to do it this way again!
