This is a composite of 11 thirty minute H-Alpha images.
Elephant Trunk Nebula w/o stars
ELEPHANT’S TRUNK NEBULA (IC 1396) (SINGLE PANEL VERSION)
I recently did a 2 panel mosaic of this nebula. This is a single panel version with much more exposure time. It is a composite of 15 one hour exposures through an H-Alpha filter.
NGC 896 – A nebula in the Constellation Cassiopeia
NGC 896 is the brightest part of the Heart Nebula and is about 7500 light years from earth. This is a narrowband image taken with the Astro-Physics 130mm Starfire telescope which is composed of 12 one hour exposures and 12 thirty minute exposures through a combination of H-Alpha, O3, and S2 Astrodon filters.
ELEPHANT’S TRUNK NEBULA (IC 1396) TWO PANEL MOSAIC
The Elephant’s Trunk Nebula is a concentration of interstellar gas and dust located in the constellation Cepheus at a distance of 2400 light years. This is a two panel mosaic composed of five 60 minute exposures (5 hours) taken through the Astro-Physics 130mm f6.3 Starfire Refractor with a .75 focal reducer and an Astrodon 3nm H-Alpha filter.
Massive snowstorm hits Prescott, AZ!
This is the aftermath of the massive snowfall in Prescott! Guess I won’t have to pull the snowblower out of its permanent home in the storage facility where it’s innards are probably clogged with ethanol residue. 🙂
WIZARD NEBULA – NGC 7380 (COLOR)
It has been difficult to find enough imaging time between the rainy weather days to complete this project. Of course, you never are really finished since you can always add more images to the stack. This image was composed by stacking 15 thirty minute H-Alpha images, 4 sixty minute H-Alpha images, and 8 thirty minute Oxygen images and then massaging the data in Maxim DL, Pixinsight, and Photoshop. To be honest, I discarded as many images as I kept due to one thing or another. The total integration (imaging) time for the images that were used was 15.5 hours.
WIZARD NEBULA NGC 7380 (GUIDED)
Happy Halloween! In this version of the Wizard Nebula I increased the sub-exposures from 15 minutes to 30 minutes which required guiding. I then stacked 11 images. This increased the resolution substantially.
The wizard nebula is a cloud of interstellar gas and dust that lies about 8000 light-years from us. In a telescope you would probably only see the cluster of stars and not the nebula itself since it is very faint.
WIZARD NEBULA – NGC 7380 (unguided)
This is another Halloween treat. Can you see the Wizard in this image of the Wizard Nebula? The total exposure time was about 6 hours through an H-Alpha filter. I will be working on a color version.
BUBBLE NEBULA (COLORIZED)
This is the result of stacking an additional five hours of SII and OIII narrowband images with the H-Alpha images that were used to produce the black and white version.
Astro La Vista Observatory 