cygnus

Feeling Blue?

 in Blog  tagged cygnus / Deneb / NGC6914 / sadr

The last of my images from OSP is NGC6914, a small reflection nebula in Cygnus.  To be honest, this includes a lot of data captured from home in addition to what I captured at OSP.  Specifically, the majority of the image (the red areas) are hydrogen, and knowing that I could get that with a narrowband H-alpha filter from home, I didn’t shoot with that filter at OSP. But combining the RGB and H-alpha data did not work out the way that I had hoped.  If there were no stars in the image it would be a simple matter of […]

A Quick Sharpless

 in Blog  tagged cygnus / Sh2-112 / Sharpless

I’m about to leave for a star party, but had to stay up late last night to finish capturing this target, and then felt compelled to do at least a quick processing to share it with you. Continuing last year’s exploration of the Sharpless Catalog, this is Sh2-112 in the constellation Cygnus.  The main (brighter) part of this nebula is a bit small for my telescope & camera, but there is a good deal of dimmer nebulosity around it, especially on the right side in this view.  And this dimmer nebulosity seems to contain all 3 of the emission lines […]

Wider…Wider…

 in Blog  tagged Butterfly Nebula / crescent nebula / cygnus / Deneb / North America Nebula / Pelican Nebula / Propeller Nebula / sadr

In my earlier attempt to capture the Spaghetti Nebula I found that the 200mm camera lens wasn’t quite wide enough.  And that a faster (lower focal ratio) lens would also be beneficial.  So I put an 85mm f/1.8 Nikkor lens (stopped down to f/2.8) on the QSI camera and tried again last night.  It didn’t work.  The moon was full last night, and even with a 3nm H-alpha filter, there was enough sky illumination to almost completely overpower the Spaghetti.  I’ll try it again when the Moon goes away, but I have to comment again on what this says about […]

Cygnus Wide Field

 in Blog  tagged canon 6d / cygnus / wide field

I mentioned in a previous post that I still had some unprocessed images from last Summer.  Honestly, I still haven’t had a chance to do much with them, but here is one example, a wide field shot of the center of the constellation Cygnus.  This was captured with a Canon 6D full-frame DSLR, with an 85mm f/1.8 lens.  It consists of just 8 frames of 30 seconds each (at ISO 6400).  The camera was modified for Hydrogen-alpha sensitivity, which is why we can see an abundance of red.  The brown regions are primarily dust and the grey is just a […]

A Tulip & a Propeller, Re-processed

 in Blog  tagged cygnus / narrowband / propeller / tulip

My productivity for the past Winter (in terms of new astro-photos produced) was well below average, and Spring has not been kind either.  So I’ve been looking at old images to see if I could find some that might benefit from the new tricks I’ve learned in processing over the last few years.  I found these two objects, which both happen to be somewhat obscure nebulae in the constellation Cygnus. The Tulip Nebula: A closer view of the actual tulip shape (center) would make for a more colorful image, but I like the contrast of this gentle flower floating on […]

Cygnus Wide Field

 in Gallery / Wide Field  tagged cygnus / photography / wide field

While shooting “deep sky” objects with the telescope at the 2011 Oregon Star Party, I had a second rig set up to shoot wide areas of the sky with a 35mm lens on a DSLR camera. It didn’t work quite as well as I had hoped. I think the main problem is that with such a dense field of stars you need higher resolution to avoid becoming just a gray area. I did several such shots and this is probably the best one because it includes a lot of hydrogen nebulous regions (the red). If you know where to look, […]