The Flame and the Horse Head - 45 Minutes of Exposure

[Colorado CJ]

I shot the Flame and Horse Head nebulas the other night. Tonight I finished the image.

It isn't the best, but it is my first image of these two (I am pretty new to this).

I did shoot over two hours of exposure, but when I uploaded the images, I seen that most have clouds throughout the images.

So, this is a 55 image stack (50 seconds each at 1600 ISO). One thing I noticed is what looks like a lot of binary stars in this photo. It seems most of the bright stars are binaries!

Man this astrophotography thing is addicting!

 

[AlanLichty]

Looks like a pretty cool shot to me.

It's fun watching you learn to play with your new toys and the results you are getting. Thanks for sharing the journey. These always leave me looking forward to the next one.

 

[JimFox]

This is so cool Andrew! Love the detail in this. And I agree with Alan, it's exiting for us to watch your progress as you grow and shoot more Astro work. You have me really paying attention because it might be something I start to dabble in next year.

 

[Ben Egbert]

This is a great hobby, one I once considered long ago when I was financing my kids college and could not afford it. Of course back then you needed to use film cameras so it was much more restrictive. But wow, what a result is possible now. Great stuff.

 

[Mike Lewis]

Yes, this is a great region of the sky that continues to reveal more and more detail the more integration time you can give it. The red H-a area that defines the Horsehead would be popping out even a little more if you had a camera that was modified to pass that wavelength more efficiently than a stock DSLR. But in any case, this is a great result.

Your comment about double stars is interesting, as I had never noticed that before. I will have to go research that a little. I do not necessarily think this is affecting your image, but sometimes with really bright stars you can get internal reflections that can appear as secondary stars near to the bright stars in the image. In looking quickly at some other images of this region it is not clear, but I think you may be right that in this case, there are a number of double stars to be seen. I will investigate that myself though as you have piqued my curiousity now

And yes, I must now tell you, I believe you are fully hooked and addicted

As Ben mentions above, this hobby really took off when digital sensors replaced film.

ML