First Image of 2016


NGC1499

The sky had been cloudy for what seemed to be an eternity, but we’re now in a brief period of sunny days and clear nights.  Of course, it is also very cold and windy.  The cold I can deal with by operating the observatory from inside the house as much as possible.  Wind, especially a strong jet stream, is more problematic.

I’ve been shooting the California Nebula (NGC1499) for the last 2 nights, using the William Optics Star71, which is relatively insensitive to atmospheric turbulence because of its small aperture and low magnification.  The first night I captured a couple of hours of Hydrogen-alpha image and 1.5 hours of SII, and both were reasonably sharp, despite the poor seeing.  Last night I captured OIII and some more SII, but none of it was really sharp enough, and I hope to get some better images tonight.

Wanting to show something for my effort, I processed the data I had using the H-alpha as luminance – meaning that it defines the sharpness of the image, while the color comes from the other channels.  There is very little oxygen (OIII) in this nebula, but this processing technique allowed me to “crank it up” without making the image look noisy.  The result is not great in terms of sharpness, but more than adequate for posting online.  When I get better images I will re-process it, perhaps using a different technique.


About Greg Marshall

I am a retired electronics engineer and after a few months of enjoying my leisure I began to miss doing product development. My astronomy hobby always needed new solutions to unique problems, so I decided that whenever I came up with a good solution I would try to make it available to others.

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