First Light with the MN66

I shot this image of the Dumb-bell Nebula last night under a full moon, and a pretty stiff wind. Other than the colors being a bit washed out, it did not come out too bad. After several false starts, this is the first real image I have made using my new MN66 Maksutov-Newtonian Telescope. It seems to be a decent combo with the Orion CCD.

This image is a 9 minute LRGB composite, guided with the DSI-Pro. (The wind did make some little ovally stars).

Center of the Lagoon

The Lagoon Nebula is a very large star forming region. It is noticeable to the naked eye this time of year as a fuzzy patch near the area where Scorpius meets the Milky Way. I shot this monochrome image of it using my Starshoot camera. The cluster overpowered my poor little achro refractor, and the color version did not turn out quite so well. It is made of a stack of 15 four minute images binned 2x2, deconvolved in MaximDL.

Another View of the Sunflower

While I was taking comparison images with the new camera, I shot this image of the Sunflower Galaxy. Compare it with the earlier ones I did through different scopes with the DSLR and the DSI. I picked up a bit of Chromatic Aberration from the scope I used, a 100mm Orion F6 Achro Refractor. It is a very good scope optically, but it does show some color.

This image is over an hour of combined imaging time, with 3 minute subs. All de-convolved and noise reduced after a median stack.

The Ring...

Here is the Ring Nebula, M57. Named for its appearance to a large glowing ring. It is, actually, pretty small through a telescope, but it does look quite a bit like this to the naked eye, with the exception of the red portions. I took this through my SN10 using my Orion DSCI. Ha! it is 57 twenty second images. Came out pretty well except for some weirdness going on with the stars that seems to be a result of the stacking process. This is one of the classic Messier Objects, which most everyone has seen at one point in photographs.

It is, in reality, a star throwing off a massive dust and gas cloud as it dies. If you look close, you can see it in the middle.

The Bad Seeing Continues...

Here is a test shot I did of M82 when I first got the new DSCI Camera. It is 36 images thirty second images binned and an equal number un-binned, deconvolved and resized into this LRGB image. Got a lot of data, too bad it looks like you are looking at it through murky pond water. This is the effect of bad atmospheric conditions.

Still a decent image though.

A Murky NGC 2903

I shot this image a few nights back when this galaxy, NGC 2903, was very low in the sky. I had to fight some skyglow and bad seeing. I did not get as much detail out of it as I wish I could have. It is 46 RGB images, and 40 Luminance images stacked and deconvolved. All images shot at 40 seconds each with my Starshoot DSCI 1.

Here is the Luminance image. I rather like it a bit better.