Last week the sky was clear every night, and although most nights either the seeing or transparency was poor, I was out every night capturing photons from this target.  This was using my new camera, a QHY268M.  I had tried it a couple of months ago (see the last post), but had trouble with internal reflections in the telescope, which have now been fixed.  So this, technically, not “first light” for this camera, but I’m going to call it that anyway, and can say that it is a great camera.  I used exposures of 5 minutes for each filter on this narrowband target.  With the previous CMOS camera it probably would have been 10 minutes to get the same quality, and with my original CCD camera even more time (I used to frequently take 30 minute exposures with that camera).

This was also “first light” for the PixInsight (PI) software used to process the image, although I have to add that a friend walked me through the process, and I doubt that I could repeat it on my own.  PI is extremely complex and has a user interface that is …, let’s say ‘unique’.  I’ve been avoiding using PI for years because it takes so much effort to learn it, but it is clearly the most popular, and quite possibly the best app for processing AP images.

I captured about 35 hours of data, but discarded a little more than half of it, so this image represents about 17 hours – a bit less than I had hoped for, and that is including many frames of marginal quality.  If I get a chance, I will get more data in the future.

The stars have been removed from the above image (obviously).  I did that to better emphasize the Ghost Rider figure, since it is my objective to get that name recognized and used for this target.  The stars were removed using Russel Croman’s StarXterminator plug-in for Photoshop.  I was quite impressed with another star removal tool I had used before, but this one is much better!

In case you don’t see the Ghost Rider figure, the image below highlights some key aspects of it:

The arc in the lower left is the front wheel of the motorcycle, and extending from it is the left side of the handlebar, with ghostly fingers around the grip.  The blue oval is the rider’s helmet (the rest of the blue area might be a cape?).  You can see the outline of his shoulder and arm, but I didn’t highlight the hand because it is too complicated.  His lower leg is bent sharply, and the entire back end of the bike is on fire!