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…
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…
Gamma Cygni Nebula from Oregon Star Party 2015
Still reprocessing old data using PixInsight, now that I have a better idea of the process flow. This data was captured at Oregon Star Party last year, but my initial processing (using Maxim DL) was not particularly satisfactory. No doubt I will come back to this again at some point as I add additional steps…
Repost: Cepheus OB4 from Oregon Star Party 2014
Final (for now) process of images of star forming region Cepheus OB4 captured at Oregon Star Party. To the left of the image is diffuse nebula NGC7822, with the OB4 complex to the right. The bright star just below center right is BD+66 1679, a magnitude 5.7 K1 star which is the only naked eye…
Reprocessing: M45 from Oregon Star Party 2014
M45 captured at Oregon Star Party in 2014. This was somewhat opportunistic; I hadn’t imaged this object in a long time, and hadn’t planned to this time around, but after opening the door of my trailer at 2am and seeing it in a perfect position in the sky to image, decided it would be worthwhile….