Posts Made By: Greg Lacy

Well, after looking at the Fabulous M42 stuff out here as of late Im a little humbled, though I am in a posting mood ( a rarity) so here it is.
This is my second pass at this guy this year ( translation with my current arsenal of equipment ) and I think it worked out well, its a nice target after all.
Im still getting used to this scope and its personality but I think Im getting a handle on it.

Near Full Moon and Chicago suburbs aside Heres what 180 Min of Narrowband imaging yielded me.

Cam: ST10-CFW10 Scope: MN 7" F4 Mount: G11Gem Other Stuff: Lots

55 min S 55 Min O 70 Min Ha; LRGB HaSHaO

Excellent! very nice shot.

Really nice, among your best.

Start at ISO 400 or 800, 1600 will blow out stars, F10? if you have it set to bulb mode and go 3 min or so given your sky noise. if unguided go 1.5 min at ISO 800, take at least 5 darks and sigma clip combine them, for lights go to town. But without more detail on sky conditions, autoguiding etc I cant give more advice than that. Remember in astro world ISO doesnt buy much if anything. And set the camera to not long exposure compensate / noise redue - or watever that is, you want to do that ( dark frame subtraction ) outside of the camera with an average combine of sampled dark frames.

I use Maxim DL with good results on the blooms, you will have issue sometimes and certianlly when taking the flame horsehead. I generally plan for these issues with camera rotation but you will find that the chip is fairly noise free and as such limiting exposure time to aviod bloom in many situations yields good resuls. Per the microlens issue, I only see that at really short FL so I am not sure what you are seeing or trying to overcome.