IC405

IC410 Tadpoles

 in Blog  tagged IC405 / ic410 / SVX80T / Tadpoles

My last astrophoto was of IC405, also known as the Flaming Star Nebula.  IC410 is a close neighbor of IC405 – a bit of it is showing at the edge of the IC405 photo.  This nebula is best known for a small feature near the center, known as “The Tadpoles”: Most of the data for this image was captured near the full moon, and even though it is all narrowband data (using 3nm filters), the moonlight and haze made the O-III frames pretty bad.  The S-II frames were also less than ideal, so I leaned heavily on the H-a data […]

Flaming Star from California

 in Blog  tagged Caldwell 31 / Flaming Star Nebula / IC405 / Sh2-229 / Stellarvue / SVX80T

My second image from our Winter in southern California is the Flaming Star Nebula (cataloged as IC405, Caldwell 31, and Sh2-229).  This was captured with the new Stellarvue SVX80T with 0.74X reducer/flattener, yielding an effective focal length of about 350mm at f/4.4.  With such fast optics a lot of information can be captured in a relatively short time.  In this case, I captured 4 hours of H-alpha, and 2 hours each of O-III and S-II.  The downside is that the optics are very sensitive to spacing and tilt.  Stellarvue recommends a spacing of 55mm +/-0.75mm from the reducer to the […]

Off to California

 in Blog  tagged Flaming Star Nebula / IC405 / RedCat / Stellarvue / SVX80T / William Optics

Above is a photo of IC405, the Flaming Star Nebula, in hydrogen-alpha.  This was captured as part of a test of a new telescope, the Stellarvue SVX80T-3.0.  Although this image looks pretty good (and I particularly like this framing of the object), I found some technical issues with the optics, and spent a good portion of the last month doing further testing and analysis.  I was able to improve it, and am on the verge of deciding that I was too critical in my first analysis.  It’s a very nice ‘scope overall, and the part I’ve been unhappy about is […]