Conditions: acquired Oct. 2005 from a suburban location near Copenhagen, Denmark; no moon, no wind, humid, medium transparency
Setup: Borg 100ED F6.4, DF-2 focusser, CFW-8 filter wheel, L-Ha-R-G-B filters, ST10XE camera, Takahashi EM-10 mount (here's a picture of this setup)
Exposure time: L: 15x400 sec and 15x10 sec (1x1 binning); Ha: 5x1200 sec (1x1 binning); R,G,B: 17x350 sec (2x2 binning)
Processing (Mira, Registar, CCDsharp, MaxIm, Photoshop): dark subtracted, flat fielded, de-bloomed, registered, median/avr combined, repaired de-blooming artifacts on L-channel using short exposure frames, enhanced nebulosity in L-channel by adding Ha signal, color balanced, Lucy Richardson deconvolution on L-channel (2 iterations), DDP, combined as LLRGB, applied color smoothing, final tweaking in Photoshop (curves,levels,etc.), cropped and reduced 50% for web format
This image was acquired from my backyard in the suburbs of Copenhagen over three nights in October, 2005. The
accumulated exposure time is more than 8 hours, thereby partly compensating for the significant lightpollution in this area.
The Cocoon nebula is embedded at the tip of a long column of dark gas extending downwards in the image above. I wish I had
rotated the camera by ~90 degrees so that more of this column would have been included in the field of view!
Here's my main page where you can see more of the pictures I have taken so far.
Comments greatly appreciated! (mikael@leif.org)
