| Description | I revisited this target with the goal of making the prettiest image of this famous target, including the famous "Pillars of Creation" of Hubble fame, which is one of the closest star birthing areas to our solar system. I was very pleased with the result, so updated this listing. You can also see 2 other attempts here. The first was a big night early in my EAA career. This target was virtually un-viewable "as captured". Here we see it post-processed so you could actually see it. I'm not sure I appreciated how a nebula needed much more capture time than a cluster. I "saved" this by restacking the raw frames in ASTAP and finishing in Affinity Photo. At the time I was quite pleased by these results. With no calibration frames, no band-pass filter, 4s exposures, and only 7 minutes of total integration, it's amazing to me that it came out this well. The 9.25 was a bit of a light bucket, I guess. In the gallery you'll also find a later capture (June 1, 2024) taken with the same camera, using my EdgeHD 8" at F10 (full focal length) which replaced the Evo 9.25. This was taken with the L-eNhance dual band-pass filter and 40m integration. It benefits from light enhancement on the "with adjustments" .png saved by SharpCap. Note the 9.25 used a mirror diagonal in its image train, the EdgeHD is straight through, so that the original image is L/R reversed. The latest capture and the second used exactly the same equipment. Just different approaches, and using Bin 2 in the latest which made a huge difference in the speed of light capture. |
