The Crescent Nebula is a super cool nebula. It looks more like a brain then a Crescent Roll to me. But hey, I didn't name it. 
My schedule has been so crazy, I had looked back at my astro with my regular astro rig and it had been 4 months since I had used it. Due to grandkids and bad weather, I just was never able to get it out. Thankfully I have the little Seestar S50, so I was able to keep up on some imaging when I could. The quality of the Seestar doesn't match my regular setup, but it helped to still get some astro.
So I did get a chance to setup my Astro gear once I got back to Southern California! So that felt great. Of course, if you have been in the Los Angeles area, you know the light pollution is really bad. This is considered Bortle 9, about as bad as it gets. At night when I look up, I don't see any black skies and stars, I see a light grey sky at night, and maybe I can see 1 star visually. But, the forecast was for some clear nights, and I was pretty desperate to use my regular astro gear. I set it up on the patio of my house. It's maybe 6 x 8 feet, and has plants along the edges. I have a pretty limited field of view due to other tall houses and trees. I can basically see from about 45 degrees up from NE to NW. So that limits what I can image here.
I picked something that would be higher in the sky for a good part of the night, so the Crescent nebula and the Wizard Nebula's were my 2 choices. I would image on the Crescent Nebula starting about 9pm until about 2pm, and then when it was getting too low, I would then switch to the Wizard Nebula and get it for about 2 hours before sky started getting too bright.
I wasn't expecting much, not with Bortle 9. I chose to use my best Narrowband filter, the 5nm ALP-T, to try and cut out as much light pollution as possible. And my thought was instead of just capturing 1 night of data and processing it. I would capture as many as possible, to get as much integration time as possible. So in this case I was able to image on it for 5 nights out of 7. I got 215 subs that I could stack. In the end that gave me almost 18 hours of integration. The most I have ever done.
When I went to process this, my jaw dropped. The images after being stacked gave me I think the best image of the Crescent Nebula I have captured!
So the lesson is, don't let light pollution slow you down, just use a strong enough Narrowband Filter, and get multiple nights of subs, and the final image will still end up with loads of details.
215 Lights @ 300 secs with Antlia ALP-T filter (About 18 Hours over 5 nights)
30 Flats
30 Dark Flats
30 Darks
ASI2600mc Pro - Astro Camera
Askar Fra500 - Scope
ZWO AM5 - Mount
ZWO EAF
ASIAir Pro - Astro Controller
Processed in Pixinsight
BlurXterminator
NoiseXterminator
StarXterminator
Finished in Photoshop
All comments are welcome,
Jim
My schedule has been so crazy, I had looked back at my astro with my regular astro rig and it had been 4 months since I had used it. Due to grandkids and bad weather, I just was never able to get it out. Thankfully I have the little Seestar S50, so I was able to keep up on some imaging when I could. The quality of the Seestar doesn't match my regular setup, but it helped to still get some astro.
So I did get a chance to setup my Astro gear once I got back to Southern California! So that felt great. Of course, if you have been in the Los Angeles area, you know the light pollution is really bad. This is considered Bortle 9, about as bad as it gets. At night when I look up, I don't see any black skies and stars, I see a light grey sky at night, and maybe I can see 1 star visually. But, the forecast was for some clear nights, and I was pretty desperate to use my regular astro gear. I set it up on the patio of my house. It's maybe 6 x 8 feet, and has plants along the edges. I have a pretty limited field of view due to other tall houses and trees. I can basically see from about 45 degrees up from NE to NW. So that limits what I can image here.
I picked something that would be higher in the sky for a good part of the night, so the Crescent nebula and the Wizard Nebula's were my 2 choices. I would image on the Crescent Nebula starting about 9pm until about 2pm, and then when it was getting too low, I would then switch to the Wizard Nebula and get it for about 2 hours before sky started getting too bright.
I wasn't expecting much, not with Bortle 9. I chose to use my best Narrowband filter, the 5nm ALP-T, to try and cut out as much light pollution as possible. And my thought was instead of just capturing 1 night of data and processing it. I would capture as many as possible, to get as much integration time as possible. So in this case I was able to image on it for 5 nights out of 7. I got 215 subs that I could stack. In the end that gave me almost 18 hours of integration. The most I have ever done.
When I went to process this, my jaw dropped. The images after being stacked gave me I think the best image of the Crescent Nebula I have captured!
So the lesson is, don't let light pollution slow you down, just use a strong enough Narrowband Filter, and get multiple nights of subs, and the final image will still end up with loads of details.
215 Lights @ 300 secs with Antlia ALP-T filter (About 18 Hours over 5 nights)
30 Flats
30 Dark Flats
30 Darks
ASI2600mc Pro - Astro Camera
Askar Fra500 - Scope
ZWO AM5 - Mount
ZWO EAF
ASIAir Pro - Astro Controller
Processed in Pixinsight
BlurXterminator
NoiseXterminator
StarXterminator
Finished in Photoshop
All comments are welcome,
Jim
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