Sh2-101 and Cygnus X1 (just)

[RobertM]

Had a go at this on Saturday as my intended target in Cassiopeia didn't get above the trees till around midnight.  The conditions were fairly bad as John can attest so I'm quite happy with this considering.  False colour curtesy of Noels tools.

13 x 5 minutes taken with the Sky90 @ f/4.5 and SXV-H9/Astronomic 13nm Ha filter.

[JohnP]

Yep - Conditions were terrible... nice image though although I have to say I prefer the B&W image that you emailed to me... You could add the false colour as a layer on top using Noels tools & then reduce opacity a little so it isn't quite as harsh....

John

[RobertM]

You mean a bit less garish like this ...



Here's the monochrome for comparison:

[MarkS]

Robert,

The difference between the 2 false colour images is pretty subtle.  I prefer the monochrome one - it's a good image and it took me some time to decode Sh2-101 as being the Tulip Nebula - one of the September challenges!

Mark

[JohnP]

Hi Robert - Yep that's better but I still prefer B&W - Something about the red colour that Noel's tools uses - It just isn't right.. I've often played around with it myself but have never been pleased with the outcome..

The B&W is excellent & like Mark points out  is one of the challenges - well done....

John

[Fay]

I like the mono one, Robert.

I also went ouside that night & did NGC7000. It came out quite bad. 15x300secs. I had a strange couple of dust bunnies. One which I think was in the light box. I cleaned all equipment yesterday & retook the light frames & redone the image.
The dust bunny had gone but image not good anyway. The other bunny I think could have been in the canon, not sure. I put camera on long exposure & blew a bit of air in there, as far as I can see it has gone.

[RobertM]

I think you are right about the colour.  Noel seems to have taken the route of trying to identify all the stars and colouring everything else red, including faint stars.  It only goes to show that you need some other channel information in order to make it look like a colour image (however false that happens to be).  

Mark, Apollogies I should have put Tulip in the header so I hope it didn't take too long to find it...

Fay, you seem to be having more than your fair share of woes recently, I hope you manage to get everything sorted out before your trip !  Be very careful when blowing air into the camera as it's possible to end up with more rather than less dust (or worse).  Air sprays in particular could leave some of the propellant on your precious glass surfaces.

Before anyone mentions it, yes the stars at the bottom of the picture are slightly out of focus - the ccd wasn't quite orthogonal to the image plane but I only noticed that at the end of the sequence.

[Fay]

It was only a gentle blow, Robert, no propellants