A Visitor in the Night

Some decent weather for a change means some sleepless nights for me. As I get to grips with how this new camera works, I’m not actually imaging rather experimenting with the settings, Binning, filter combinations and how much exposure is needed for different types of object especially the Narrow band filters. An object like NGC7000 the North American nebula is rich in Hydrogen Alpha ( Ha ) so last night I captured 21 frames in all at 180 seconds each with the Ha filter at 4x binning ( this combines 4 adjacent pixels to make the camera super sensitive and thus allowing for shorter exposures ). I also had to capture a set of dark frames at the same settings, I was at this stage when I heard a noise from outside the observatory, a sort of snuffling rummaging noise, yep a Hedgehog had come a calling. I decided to give it some cat food as I’ve not seen one for ages and I quite like the prickly little beasts, he didn’t take long finding it either and I would say quite hungry too, I hope it stays so as to keep the slugs down in the veg patch.

Anyway back to the nebula, the part of the north american nebula I imaged is called the wall and has a lot of contrasty detail, I think it turned out fine. But I could not get all of the object in the field of view so I will have to do it again with a wider field instrument and capture the Ha data again, also the OxygenIII ( OIII ) and SulphurII ( SII ) data to go with it.