Hi Folks
Melbourne had its first cloudless and 'moon less' night in about two months last night. And hopefully we'll have another one tonight.
So after setting everything up out on my driveway - about an hour, followed by alignment and setting up the autoguiding - another hour I finally got to do some imaging.
Last nights target was Gum 85, a very faint Ha emission nebula in the constellation of Serpens. It was the last object imaged by Australian astronomer Colin Stanley Gum as part of his PhD thesis titled 'A Survey Of Southern HII Regions'. March 1955. The link below provides a list of Colin's published papers. Tragically he died in a skiing accident in April 1960 whilst hoildaying in Switzerland.
http://adsabs.harvard.edu/cgi-bin/ba...+gum&version=1
http://s604.photobucket.com/user/pfw...8524e.jpg.html
The image consists of 15 x 5 minute subs taken at ISO 800 on a Canon 60Da through a SW BD ED-120 APO. Guiding was the best I've had yet, using PHD Guiding and an Orion 80 guidescope. 21 Flat field frames and 21 Dark Frames were subtracted using Nebulosity 3.0 which was also used for pre-processing. Levels etc were done in CS5.
NGC 6604 is the group of bright stars to the right of the nebula.
As always folks your feedback would be much appreciated.
Paul
