Nearly first light with my new Christmas pressy, a full spectrum modified Canon 1100D. It's summer, it's cloudy, but hey there's small gaps in them there clouds! So there I was, sitting in the observatory taking 30 second subs in the cloud gaps by hand as I was being eaten by mossies. It took me 4 hours to get 97 x 30 second sub frames of this, the Rosette Nebula with integrated cluster NGC2244.
I've been wanting this for ages. And of course I want more data. About 5 - 10 times as much would be nice and in cooler weather. This was taken in 27 degree air temp and this camera isn't cooled. Hopefully I'll add to it at a later date, but here's what I have so far and really, I'm quite impressed with what I got.
Capture details: 97 x 30 seconds, GSO 10" F4 Newtonian, Canon modified 1100D, Baader Semi-Apo filter, Baader MPCC MKIII, HEQ5 Pro unguided. Stacked in DSS, processed in Photoshop. Pleeze ignore the small worm farm. I'm not finished with it yet.
Info from Wiki "The cluster and nebula lie at a distance of some 5,000 light-years from Earth and measure roughly 50 light years in diameter. The radiation from the young stars excites the atoms in the nebula, causing them to emit radiation themselves producing the emission nebula we see. The mass of the nebula is estimated to be around 10,000 solar masses.
A survey of the nebula with the Chandra X-ray Observatory has revealed the presence of numerous new-born stars inside optical Rosette Nebula and studded within a dense molecular cloud. Altogether, approximately 2500 young stars lie in this star-forming complex, including the massive O-type stars HD 46223 and HD 46150, which are primarily responsible for blowing the ionized bubble. Most of the ongoing star-formation activity is occurring in the dense molecular cloud to the south east of the bubble."
hope to see plenty more of your 1100D creations 
