Monthly Archives: October 2011

Starting Crescent Nebula – NGC6888

With a little imaging time left in the evening, I started on NGC6888, the Crescent Nebula, as it is now well positioned in my limited hole in the sky.

The moon was quite bright – between 1st quarter and full – and washing out the sky a little. However, NGC6888 is an emission nebula, so produces a fair amount of H-Alpha light, and this is much less affected by moonlight.

The first night I managed 70 minutes in 10-minute subs. The next night, 90 minutes more in 15-minute subs. So, for the start of this project, this is 160 minutes of H-Alpha in 10-minute and 15-minute subs.

More data on this target will take several weeks, I imagine.

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Start capturing colour for M13.

It was a pleasant evening last night – very clear, and unseasonably warm (+17 degrees at midnight, after frost the night before).

I was able to capture an hour of Red data for M13 under good steady skies. I thought it might be interesting to share the colour channels data for such projects as they are collected, in case others might like to use them to experiment with processing, colour combination, etc. (I found few such examples to play with when doing my own searching some years ago.)

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Starting M13 project

Now, in mid-autumn, the sky has rotated to the point where M13 is well-located from my observing spot – and it’s dark earlier too. So I started an M13 data collection project tonight with 2 hours of luminance data, in 5-minute subs. Colour will follow over the next few available nights.