G'day all,
On Saturday we had an SDSO night out at Tammin, a great night of viewing and photography. My equipment was running surprisingly nice too, considering the night before the RA motor wouldn't behave at all! So I spent the night doing exposures up to 300 seconds unguided.
This one is of the Veil nebula, an object I've never seen before or photographed. It's so low to the north it's just not usually a consideration. With the spectacular horizons at Tammin (almost zero) it was quite easy.
The guiding wasn't perfect but I couldn't be bothered with the autoguider, and thought it would suffice. It has sufficed, but there is some trailing in the image and I think distortion more so than trailing. I think a lot of the distortion was from atmospheric refraction, just because of the position of it all graduating up from the horizon, but I could be wrong.
The image has been fairly heavily processed to try and bring out the veil nebulosity. I'm open to suggestions on how to improve it, I was struggling to bring the veil out but not the stars.
See large version here (526kb):
http://www.rogergroom.com/items/veilnebula_200909
I'm really happy to have grabbed this object I thought that I'd never get an opportunity to image .. now next time I just have to bother with the autoguider and do 10 min exposures.
Roger.
