COPYRIGHT, PLEASE NOTE

All the material on this website is copyrighted to J-P Metsavainio, if not otherwise stated. Any content on this website may not be reproduced without the author’s permission.

Have a visit in my portfolio

Friday, September 17, 2010

NGC 7000, the "North America" nebula closeup, second round





Close up of the NGC 7000, the "North America" nebula.
Image is composed from O-III and H-a narrowband channels to a bi-color image.
This palette is close to a visiblel spectrum.
I'll shoot more O-III and S-II for this, to build a HST-palette image, later.

I managed to solve the orthogonality problem between the optical path and the CCD. Now stars are as good as they can in my imaging system. I have reduced Meade LX200 GPS 12" f10 to f5 by misusing a Celestron f6.3 reducer by placing it at longer distance from CCD and hence grove the reduction factor.
The price is coma at both ends of the image but I can live with it. This system gives me about 30* field and a spatial resolution of 0,75 arc seconds/pixel. 

An experimental starless image. Stars are removed in one processing step and placed back with zero data lost. Sometimes I publish an image with a reduced stars to show the actual nebula better. It looks kind of nice, or spooky, that's a matter of taste.




Closeup

Processing work flow: 
Image acquisition, MaxiDL v5.07. 
Stacked and calibrated in CCDStack. 
Deconvolution with a CCDSharp, 30 iterations. 
Levels, curves and color combine in PS CS3.

Telescope, Meade LX200 GPS 12" @ f5 
Camera, QHY9 Guiding, SXV-AO @ 6Hz 
Image Scale, 0,75 arcseconds/pixel 
Exposures H-alpha 15x1200s, binned 1x1=5h
O-III 1x1200s binned 3x3



No comments: