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Sunday, January 29, 2012

What?


"?"

A gray scale image of the Hydrogen alpha emission line. Click for a large image!

For a long time we have had clear weather, freezing too. I have spent couple of night shooting some new material. This cosmic question mark, in constellation Cepheus, contains following objects; At top, Cederblad 214 (Ced 214) surrounded by NGC 7822, a dot like nebula at the bottom is known as Sharpless 170,(Sh2-170).  Image spans about three and half degrees vertically. 

Total exposure time is about 7h with an ultra fast Canon EF 200mm f1.8 optics and the QHY9 astronomical camera. I'll shoot other channels, emission of Oxygen and Sulfur, later, for a color image.


Technical details:

Processing work flow:
Image acquisition, MaxiDL v5.07.
Stacked and calibrated in CCDStack2.
Levels, curves, color and mosaic combine in PS CS3.

Optics, Canon EF 200mm camera lens at f1.8
Camera, QHY9
Guiding, Meade LX200 GPS 12" and a Lodestar guider
Image Scale, ~4,5 arcseconds/pixel
Exposures, Baader 7nm H-a, 13x1200s + 10x900s
Calibration with Darks, Flats and Bias frames.


2 comments:

Artyom Chitailo said...

And the answer is "42"! =)

Awesome image, thank you!

J-P Metsavainio said...

Yes! 42... great!
Wait to see the color version, even though I personally find the gray scale one more interesting.