Another image captured at Oregon Star Party this year, framing both the Iris and Ghost nebulas in Cepheus. This is a challenging target, covering large areas of low-contrast reflection nebulosity, and which benefits from the extremely dark and transparent skies available at OSP. This is a redo of an attempt to capture the same framing…
Walk-Through of an Image Processing Workflow
This post shows at a high level the stages in processing the data captured during an imaging session all the way through to the final image, in this case the image of the Iris and Ghost nebulas that I captured at Oregon Star Party this year. The picture above is a screen capture taken on…
NGC7822 From Oregon Star Party
Click for Full Size Image Back from Oregon Star Party, with some more image data to process. This year saw a big improvement in conditions, thanks to an earlier date intended to avoid smoke from wildfires that proved to be such a problem last year. This strategy was successful, and we had only a touch…
IC1396 From Oregon Star Party
It’s August, and so it’s time for some more dark skies at Oregon Star Party. As usual, a week of dry, dark skies at high elevation and some great times with about 600 or so friends in the Ochoco Forest in central Oregon. Unfortunately, as increasingly seems to be the new normal, the skies were heavily…
The North America & Pelican Nebulas
My final image from Oregon Star Party. I had quite a bit of difficulty just getting this image to upload to the blog, and tried many different strategies all of which broke WordPress. The difficulty arises because of the high resolution and large file size; the final image is 4713×3144 pixels and over 21MB, and…
The Elephant’s Trunk Nebula
Number 2 in my set of images captured at this year’s Oregon Star Party. This is part of the emission nebula known as IC1396 in the constellation Cepheus, featuring a formation known as the Elephant’s Trunk Nebula. This large cloud of mostly hydrogen is about 2,400 light years away from us, and although much too…
Inner Workings of the Milky Way
Number 3 in my set of images from Oregon Star Party. This one includes emission nebula NGC6820 surrounding open cluster NGC6823 (see annotated low-res version), again in the direction of the core of the Milky Way from our viewpoint. Also visible are many dark clouds of dust, in addition…
Dust Clouds in the Milky Way
Image number 4 captured under the incredibly dark skies at Oregon Star Party last week. This image features several clouds of interstellar dust that appear as reflection and absorption nebulae, centered on the reflection nebula van den Bergh 126, and surrounded by several absorption nebulae that appear in…
M31 from Oregon Star Party
I have a few images from the fantastic dark skies at Oregon Star Party which I will be posting over the next few days. I ranked the pictures in order of how much I like each of them, and will be writing them up in reverse order; this one is number 5. This is M31, also…
Presentation from Oregon Star Party
Last week at Oregon Star Party I presented some more details of my image processing workflow using PixInsight, particularly covering pre-processing and calibration. Here is a pdf version of my slides, and more importantly, a copy of the workflow document that I was discussing. As I mentioned during my presentation, I recommend writing your own workflow document,…