I spent the nights from April 28 to May 1st at DARC, again :-)

Besides finishing my Little Dipper mosaic and a few other things, at some point late during the last session but still with some night time left, I decided to go for an unusual framing of M13. Unfortunately, after three wonderful nights, that night, the end of this night wasn't so good, and in fact I ended up throwing away all the shots.

Therefore, on May 3rd, I went up to Henry Coe State Park (one of the parks that is scheduled to close in September 2011, sadly) to at least get some color data.

And after that, the next day, on Wednesday (May 4th) I got some courage and went back to DARC, this time capturing about 20x10 minutes of luminance and a bit more RGB. In the end I only used the RGBs from DARC because the ones from Coe seemed a tad out of focus.

Now, about the image I am presenting here, the star in the lower left is Eta Herculis, and the globular cluster is, of course, M13.. The background variations are exaggerated, but they're not artifacts. Still, there's a round dark patch to the right of M13 that, although I haven't investigated it, it looks like it might be a badly deflated dust mote.

People who are familiar with this object and astrophotography would say that the FSQ is not the right telescope to use for this object, M13. Well, yes, they are right. However, I think I managed to capture an interesting image that isn't just centered on the famous globular cluster, and provide a unique view, if not of this object, at least of the area in the sky where it sits.

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DATE May 4th, 2011 PHOTO Exposure: L: 20 x 10', RGB: 6x5' each, Total: 4.8 hours Focal: 510mm, f/5

EQUIPMENT Imaging Scope: FSQ 106 EDX Camera: STL11k Guide Camera: StarShoot Autoguider Mount: EM-400

SITE & CONDITIONS DARC Observatory Seeing: Average Transparency: Average SOFTWARE Stacking: PixInsight Processing: PixInsight

Here's an image of Coma Berenices, also known as Melotte 111.

It was after seeing this image that I decided to get a new set of filters to avoid the huge halos around the bright stars - which I did just a few weeks later.

Also, there's a few strange things in this image. Most stars seem to have a rather pronounced color ring, and the brightest stars look quite blurred. One could think this blurry effect was an effect of the post-processing, but it's not.

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DATE May 1st, 2011 PHOTO Exposure: L: 8 x 20', RGB: 5x3' each, Total: 3.4 hours Focal: 510mm, f/5

EQUIPMENT Imaging Scope: FSQ 106 EDX Camera: STL11k Guide Camera: StarShoot Autoguider Mount: EM-400

SITE & CONDITIONS DARC Observatory Seeing: Good Transparency: Good SOFTWARE Stacking: DeepSkyStaker Processing: PixInsight & Photoshop

Sometimes, when I'm at a dark site, working on any given project, I run into "dead" times. Moments when there's no point in spending time shooting at my chosen targets. Perhaps because they're already too low in the sky, maybe because they aren't high enough.

When these moments are long enough, an hour, maybe more, I often improvise, and do a quick capture of "something" I haven't even thought of it... Many times these shots don't go anywhere. But sometimes, they marvel me.

This image is one of such. During one of the New Moon nights of September 2010, when I was done for the night working on a project, I improvised just a few shots to the Hyades, in Taurus, being this an area it has always interested me visually, despite it's not a usual astrophoto target.

The image bears very little data for astrophotography standards. All four filters gathered light for less than one hour combined. It's so little data because as I said, it was just something improvised to "kill" time...

So just about 1 hour of data, and just a bit longer spent on processing the image, rendered however what I feel is a refreshing view of one of the areas of the sky that, despite being quite visible, even to the unaided eye, at moderately dark sites, it has received little to no attention from the amateur astrophotography community.

Because this was the last unprocessed data I had at the time, when I calibrated and stacked the images at home, at first I was simply getting the image "done", but the moment I saw a hint of galactic cirrus in it (and as you may guess I always look for any faint signal the image may offer), I became interested! Considering the little time spend, I'm actually very happy the way it turned out.

The composition didn't aim for many goals either. I wanted to place the star Aldebaran at a location in the field of view that would support and balance the image. Not in the middle, but somewhere where it would give enough weight so as to become the "holding point". From my perspective I believe I achieved that simple goal.

This was the first image I processed only with PixInsight 1.61, from the very first stages of calibration, registration and integration.

As for the galactic cirrus (the faint background dust clouds), I have compared the field with its corresponding area from the IRAS survey and the background clouds match quite well, in some cases being virtually identical structures, so I have no doubt the signal is good. The only area that doesn't match is around Aldebaran: in the IRAS data you can see structures around it, but in my image there's just brightness and you cannot see any structures. Here's a screen shot of that area as captured in the IRAS survey, after placing dots over the location of the main stars, to better compare both images:

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DATE September 5th, 2010 PHOTO Exposure: L: 5 x 5', RGB: 3x3' each, Total: 52 minutes Focal: 385mm, f/3.6

EQUIPMENT Imaging Scope: FSQ 106 EDX w/Reducer Camera: STL11k Guide Camera: StarShoot Autoguider Mount: EM-400

SITE & CONDITIONS DARC Observatory Seeing: Average Transparency: Very Good SOFTWARE Stacking/Calibration: PixInsight Processing: PixInsight

On Thursday May 6th, at Dino Pt, when I was "done" taking shots of my current project, I went for a quickie of this pair (M10 and M12) that despite they're not that far apart, I've never seen as a pair before.

Since I was just taking something without any preparation or plans, I first did a quick processing that resulted into a nice and simple image of these two globular clusters (800x532 version, 3779x2512 version).

Then I posted this version on a web forum and a couple of friends were quick to say "I stretched your image and I saw there's some of that dust we like so much". Funny, because when processing the luminance I too I did notice a few "odd" structures that I knew couldn't be gradients,

Anyway, this area is rather close to the Milky Way, so it makes sense there's "stuff" in the FOV, so I reprocessed it. I wasn't completely happy with the results so a couple of nights later at DeepSky Ranch I decided to capture more luminance, this time 7 subs of 15 minutes each. The "dusty" result is what you can see above. The image isn't as contrasty and probably less appealing to some than the original version, but for those into this type of thing I think it's kind of cool. The structures aren't as well defined as they should because the data is still somewhat marginal and this stuff is really faint.

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DATE May 6th, 2010 PHOTO Exposure: L: 3 x 10' + 7 x 15', RGB: 3x5' each, Total: 3 hours Focal: 385mm, f/3.6

EQUIPMENT Imaging Scope: FSQ 106 EDX w/Reducer Camera: STL11k Guide Camera: StarShoot Autoguider Mount: EM-400

SITE & CONDITIONS Dinosaur Point and DeepSky Ranch, California Seeing: Terrible Transparency: Good SOFTWARE Stacking: DeepSkyStaker Processing: PixInsight & Photoshop

Most classic images of M45 - also known as The Pleiades or the Seven Sisters - tend to capture the blueish reflected dust of this famous cluster. However, the region of our galaxy in this direction also has the typical reddish hydrogen gas emission. Also, some dust doesn't reflect the light from the stars so strongly, so it acquires a grayish hue. This widefield image, captured during CalStar'09, shows this peculiar dance of dust and gas, easily differentiated by their colors.

This image was selected as NASA's Astronomy Picture of the Day on October 14th, 2009

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DATE September 17-19th, 2009 PHOTO Exposure: L: 11 x 10', R: 6 x 10', G: 6 x 10', B: 12 x 15', Total: 6.8 hours Focal: 385mm, f/3.6

EQUIPMENT Imaging Scope: FSQ 106 EDX w/Reducer Camera: STL11k Guide Camera: StarShoot Autoguider Imaging Scope: EM-400

SITE & CONDITIONS CalStar @ Lake San Antonio, California Seeing: Good/Ok Transparency: Very Good/Regular SOFTWARE Stacking: DeepSkyStaker Processing: PixInsight & Photoshop

COMMENTS
I went to Coe the night of August 12th to take some widefield and hope that some Perseids make into the FOV. But when I was done setting up my equipment, the Pleyades looked at me in a funny way, and I changed my plans,

However, since it was already very late and I was very tired, I didn't want to stay there until sunrise, so I ended up doing only 3 shots, 17 minutes each. Yeah, that would put the Canon to the limit but I really wanted to see how much data I could gather without breaking the camera :-), so I went to the longest single exposure I've ever done (17 minutes). With that, some canned darks (15 minutes darks though) and over 5hours processing, I've got this picture.

The image is rather noisy, but considering I had only a handful of frames, I think this is probably the best work I've done as far as applying the noise reduction - it's often hard to find the best point where the image isn't too noisy neither too blurry. Also, the nebulosity surrounding M45 wasn't that blue at first, and I admit pushing the level a bit too much to the blue side.

In any case, I am very happy with this image for several reasons. First, I conquered an amount of detail and depth I wasn't expecting - the data was there in the picture, but the processing was crucial here. Second, this was the first time I took single exposures over 15 minutes and the guiding came out pretty good - although of course this field has plenty of bright stars to use as guides :-) And third, the Pleyades was one of my very first astrophotography targets back in December 2007, and it was very nice to compare the old version with the new one.

In any case, here's an object that I will most definitely revisit later on, but with more shots, exposure, and definitely more coffee :-)

COMMENTS
First nigth out ever!! There are tons of images of the Pleyades out there. If you've already seen a few, this one might not add anything to what you've already seen, but being my second astrophoto ever, I cannot be more proud! :-) The fact that it's only 3 shots, 3 minutes each, also shows how bright this object is - well, at least the reflection nebula surrounding the brightest stars :-)