I find the homunculus nebula in eta carina a fascinating dso visually as its one of the few dso's to show colour, but I have never seen an image of it posted on IIS.
Would it be within reach of the planetary imaging brigade with their toucams?
I tried the other night. This is a case where the eyes are better than a camera!
The dynamic range of the Homunc is so great that you need a real short exposure so that EtaC does not over power the nebula, but at such a short expousure you don't catch any detail. It's a catch22 object.
I'm sure it's possible, but I didn't have any luck!
DaveP , Look for the brightest section of the eta carina neb, then look at the brightest star within that part and crank the power up and you see a nice surprise
No I dont have any imaging gear myself, I prefer to let others do the hard work and suffer the frustrations
Here is a 100% crop from a 17 sec exposure taken with a Tal 200k 200mm at f8.5. It was a focus check exposure. Obviously 17 sec is too long. May show some detail with a shorter exposure and some magnification. Could be worth trying.
I just looked at Eddies...wow...so many 1 sec exposures with a combination of different exposure lengths...looks like a lot of work with only 10 minutes of exposure total...very nice.
This is a very small object too, so you need a large scope and good seeing to capture detail. I stumbled on it by accident once. It was a nice surprise indeed, Geoff.
Bright orange star in the cluster just would not want to come to focus. What could that be. Up the power, and aha! nebulosa! It's clearly visible even from my light polluted back yard, but dark skies will let you crank the power more.
The other one to go for in this region is the Hubble picture below. It is visible in Eddie T's picture.
Hi All,
Here is a sneak preview of what I've done. It's part of my first light project on the RC. Matter of fact I'm working on capturing the Homonculous tonight.
