Anthony's Astrophotography

When I get a chance to drag myself away from work I sometime take the opportunity to visit a good friend who lives in Taromeo in the Blackbutt ranges to do some imaging of the night sky.

Living in South East QLD the warmer months tend to spell the end of our opportunities to do any quality imaging. Luckily however, the evening of the 13^th Oct 2012 proved to be one of the best evenings I have had the pleasure of imaging in. Seeing conditions had to be 9/10 and stayed that way for the whole night.

While I managed to get some great data on M31, M33 and the Rosette Nebula I was most pleased with my redo of the Horse Head Nebula. In late 2011 I had the chance to image the Horse Head and found it to be a real challenge when using a standard DSLR camera as the Hydrogen Alpha emissions are mostly blocked by the factory filters.

Not to shy away from a challenge I pointed my 90mm William Optics Megrez refractor and DSLR back over to the East and learning from last year’s experiences snapped away for many an hour gathering those faint photons.

All up I took:

• 15 * 300 Second Frames at ISO 800.
• 15 * 300 Second Dark Frames.
• 15 * Flat files
• 15 * Bias Frames

I took all of the above data and loaded it into Deep Sky Stacker for a final compiled image that was further processed in Photoshop. To be completely honest there was not much adjustment required to get the final product. I was very happy with the image and it shows that despite the challenges and frustrations sometimes experienced when things don’t work as I want, I have managed to see a significant improvement on my last attempt.

It goes to show you how much of a journey Astrophotography is and considering you can always go back and revisit an imaging target you have done before, you will never run out of things to take photos of.

I hope you enjoy.

Cheers

Anthony