I haven’t posted anything here for a ridiculously long time (sorry!).  For most of the time since my last post I’ve been busy manufacturing stuff for my OEM customers, but for the last few weeks I’ve been on vacation in Santa Fe, New Mexico.  Although I brought a bunch of astronomy gear along, various things have conspired to keep me from doing much imaging.  The vacation is about over now, but recently I managed to get a fair amount of data on the Wizard Nebula (NGC 7380), an emission nebula in the constellation Cepheus.  I captured H-alpha frames first and got about 5 hours of data, but later had only enough time for 1.5 hours each of O-III and S-II.  As expected, this resulted in a good H-a image, but quite noisy O-III and S-II images.  To make the best use of this data I first assembled a color image using just the S and O frames, with S assigned to red and O assigned to both green and blue.  This color image was then heavily filtered to reduce noise.  I then applied the H-a data as a luminance layer to produce the image you see here.  This was a fairly “quick & dirty” processing, but I’m so rusty on processing astro photos that I’m not sure I could really make it much better.

The Wizard is a pretty small target for the ‘scope and camera I used (SVX80T and ASI1600), so I cropped it quite a lot, and rotated it to show the wizard as more-or-less upright.

The night sky has been really great here.  I’m actually about 20 miles south of Santa Fe, and the city is a fairly small one (about 80,000 population), so it’s not super dark here, but much better than at home, and certainly more than dark enough for narrowband imaging such as this.  The seeing (steadiness of the air) has also been very good, although the magnification in this case does not begin to test the seeing, with about 1.6 arcseconds per pixel (in the original data – this image is reduced from that).

I’ve been participating in meetings with the Santa Fe Stargazers club since the beginning of the year, and finally got to meet some of them in person.  They are a great group, and have been very helpful during my stay here.