Sunday, December 28, 2008

Orion Nebula on a cold night out with the telescope

Last night we and a couple of amateur astronomers were out on the flying field near Netersel again. After some hours of observing my battery failed and I had to stop. Morelinux suggested to try to photograph M42/M43 (the Orion nebula) my eos400d on his Meade LX90 SCT. Since this is a pure visual instrument I got many guiding problems (also because of the long focal point). I made 40 exposures of 15sec but only 12 were good enough for stacking. This is the result of a stack with Deepskystacker of 12x15sec at ISO800 with a Meade LX90 200m SCT @ F/10 (F=2000mm). 10 Dark frames and 10 bias frames were used to compensate the noise. Postprocessing was done with CS2 incl. the GradientXTerminator tool. We logged and saw many objects this night, and also got some visitors from the modelflying club (many oohs and ahhs). At the end of the night (3.00hrs) it was freezing about -3.5C and we decided to stop.
Here's a picture of us in the freezing cold.

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