The nights are dark again but with that comes a series of nights with clouds. Mostly the clouds are just high and thin but they are not good for astrophotography. Despite that, I’ve had some success. The Cosmic Bat didn’t turn out so well and I spent a lot of time on it. Oh well, there will be more good nights, I hope.
The Cosmic Bat and associated dust clouds. This small and dim nebula is located in the Orion constellation. I would need to spend many more hours to get a good image, but I think I will quit with this. I gathered photons for three nights, between clouds, for a total of 6 hours. After the Cosmic Bat I needed to work on some more spectacular nebulas. I’ve done the Rosette Nebula before but that was prior to having guiding and dithering. With guiding, I rarely have to throw out any subs. Before, I would sometimes lose 25-50% of my subs due to poor tracking and oblong stars. Dithering (small random movements of the image framing) eliminates much of the noise and random errors that result from long exposures. The end result, I get more and better keepers and therefore more exposure on a given night. It has been a whole year since I’ve done the Horsehead Nebula and I was excited to do it again, this time with guiding and dithering. I think this came out exceptionally nice!
