Skies cleared late morning which allowed some nice views and images to be taken of the 99.9% Harvest Moon along with a couple of narrow band images of the Tulip and the Great Orion nebulae. The image were taken with an ASI 533MM Pro camera attached to an Altair EDF60 fitted with a 0.8 x FR. For the Moon some 4,278 images were taken in a two minute SER file using Astro DMx Capture. 50% of the images were stacked in Autostakkert! and then Registax was used to wavelet sharpen the resultant Tiff file which was then further processed in Adobe CS2 and saved as a png file. Due to the very bright moonlight an occulting baffle was used to shield the scope from the moon's glare to allow 50 minutes of SII narrow band imaging of SH2-101 (the Tulip nebula in Cepheus) and 62 minutes of Sulphur, Oxygen and Hydrogen alpha data of M42 (the Great Orion Nebula.) The Tulip SII data was combined with OIII and Ha data taken previously and stacked in Pixinsight using the Hubble palette to produce the final image of 2.5 hours total exposure. For M42 ~ 20 minutes each of SHO data were similarly processed to give just over an hours worth total exposure. The montage shows the position of the full moon at the time of data capture and the apparatus used to capture the data during high tide at Machynys Llanelli.
Click on an image to get a closer view.
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