IC1805 - Heart Nebula North West portion

[RobertM]

Took advantage of the exceptionally clear conditions last night (certainly the best I've had since the spring) to capture this portion of the Heart Nebula in Cassiopeia.  The guide star was moving barely at all visibly and the guiding corrections were tiny so even with the moon it was great conditions for Ha imaging.  Looks like dark still nights are nearly upon us at last !

Capture details:

IC1805 the Heart Nebula in Cassiopeia.

Date: 10/10/2008
Camera: Starlight-Xpress SXV-H9
Filter: Astronomik 13nm Ha
Subs:12 x 10m + 1 x 20m (total of 140 minutes)
Scope: Takahashi Sky90@f/4.5 guided by ED80 + Atik16ic

Normal size:


or full size:
http://farm4.static.flickr.com/3002/2931444310_138921d1cb_o.jpg

(Edited to replace full-size image with link to same. Please link to images when they're that large. Thanks. Rick.)

[JohnP]

Very nice Robert - I love this Neb & wow a 20min exposure guiding must have been great. I guess you must be well chuffed with this....

John

[Daniel]

Robert, that is just wonderfull, and fantastic that the full res stands up to scrutiny too, did you use drizzle on this image, I didn't think the SXV-H9 went as high res as this. Last night was wonderfull, started out a little whispy, but im guessing thia was taken quite late when it got extremely clear.

Awesome image!

Daniel
:O)

[RobertM]

Sorry Rick,will do as you asked in future.

Thanks for the kind comments.

John, I started off wanting to do all 20min subs but the stars in the lower right were looking very oval, the 10 mins subs looked good so I went with those.  20 mins would have been a better (though more risky) option though !

Daniel, it may be Drizzle if thats what it's called.  It relies on MaximDL dithered guiding which is where each sub is marginally offset from the last, this helps S/N and allows me to get better resolution than the original would have been and nice round stars  

[Fay]

That is beautiful Robert. I really do prefer mono a lot of the time. Really crisp

[MarkS]

Stunning detail!!

A fantastic image Robert.

I thought dithering just moved the image a tiny amount between frames - yours has doubled the image size which I thought was drizzle (as did Daniel)

Mark

[RobertM]

Thanks Mark, this was certainly one of the most satisfying to process.  The processing I use really is a bit of both and makes the image better looking than the native 3.6 arcsec/pixel that these images are taken at.  The smaller stars focus down to either a 2x2 pixel square or a single pixel so I hope you can understand where I'm coming from...