Tonight has been around 20°F, but I was silly enough to set up the telescope – the skies were just too inviting. Though the wind had died down from last night’s hurricaine, it was still a bit windy at times tonight. I’m not sure if it was that, the cold or something else, but I had great difficulty aligning the scope tonight – it took almost an hour and it still wasn’t right. I’m sure at least part of the issue was me wanting to hurry and get the thing aligned so I could start imaging from inside the relative warmth of my garage, but regardless it was a bit frustrating. I took some time to look around, particularly at Mars this evening – it’s still nice and bright in the evening sky and I could see it pretty clearly in my telescope. I also was able to show it off to some neighborhood kids who were crazy enough to be out in this cold and walked by. I didn’t take any pictures of it, though. Instead, I went back to M42-The Great Orion Nebula that I imaged on New Years Eve. I decided to get more images of M43 – deMairen’s Nebula which is kind of stuck on one end of the M42 since that area of the image was a bit grainy. I got maybe 60-70 good shots of it that I stacked and added to those I took the other night. I also actually composited what’s called the Luminence channel with the image. This is something I haven’t done before and I’ll explain how it works in a later post. For folks involved in CCD astrophotography they’ll know what I mean. They also might wonder why I’ve never used it before. The answer is because I’m lazy. I’m also planning on adding some longer exposures to the image (once I have the chance to take them) to see if that brings out more of the faint areas of the nebula. I believe it should. My concern is that i don’t want to overexpose other areas of the image. I’d really like to keep the Trapezium visible.
The combination is an 18 minute 8s exposure (271 4 second exposures). I think this is shaping up pretty nicely. This is what I wound up with:
M42-Great Orion Nebula on 1/2/08
Sometimes I worry that I post too many of the same images on my site – this makes 3 of this in a row – but for me, learning about astronomy is a process and I use the blog to share what I’m learning and how I’m learning it. I guess that’s one of the things I really like about this is that I get a lot of advice as I go from people which obviously helps me learn more and get more out of the hobby, but also I think by discussing what I do, I tend to learn it better myself.
You are a crazy man… it is so cold… so very cold. I can’t believe I used to live in Chicago.
Comment by stelmodad — January 3, 2008 @ 12:54 pm
20 degree’s would almost feel like tee shirt weather for me at the moment.The temps here are 1 degree F and dropping quick.A northerly breeze have windchills at -10 degrees.Other parts of the state are already below -10F without the windchill….Brrrrrrr!!!
.Just one of the reasons why I haven’t taken my scope out.Heh,to add insult to injury,we had over 4 feet of snow for the month of December.The skiers and snowmobilers love it.I of course would go so far as to plant a palm tree in front of my house just to fool Mother nature into thinking we were in the tropics,just so she would give us a heatwave.HAHAHAHAHAHAHA!!.
I have tried to image Orion with my DSI and only manage to get a close up shot of the trapezium.If I get a decent night this weekend,I will use the DSLR instead.Good job on the new image.You have a lot of detail in the image!.
Comment by Andrew — January 3, 2008 @ 7:02 pm
Thanks. I moved south from St. Louis in part because I wanted warmer weather. For this part of the country, 20° is really, really cold. I’m still going out again tonight, though.
Comment by Ed — January 3, 2008 @ 7:45 pm