Conditions: taken Dec. 2+3, 2003 from a moonlit and light polluted sky in Boulder, CO; medium/low transparency, a few clouds.
Setup: Borg 100ED F6.4, DF-2 focusser, CFW-8, H-alpha filter, ST10XE, MaximDL/CCD, Takahashi EM-10 mount (here's how this setup looks)
Exposure time: 1x2 mosaic, 10x900 sec on each frame
Processing in Mira6 & Mira7: dark subtracted, flat fielded, masked hot/cold pixels, removed blooming, registered subframes, sigma-reject combined, registered mosaic frames
Processing in Photoshop7: curves and levels, merged mosaic images, layers and curves to emphasize the faint areas. For this web version I had to reduce the image size by a factor two to fit most monitors.
A few nights later I tried to image this region with a H-beta filter (2x3600 sec on each frame), however the result was
disappointing; i.e. there was barely no signal. I do not understand why so many say that a H-beta filter is essential to visually catch this object?
Here's my main page where you can see more of the pictures I have taken so far.
Comments greatly appreciated! (mikael@leif.org)
