December: Test shots with new scopes/mounts
Dec 21: TMB 80/480 Arrives!
Dec 3: AP1200 Arrives!
Nov 30: TMB 152/1200 Arrives!
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This is a new image of M42, captured almost one year to the date after catching the astrophotography bug with this old image of M42. This is also my first image taken with a modified Digital Rebel. For this I used fellow Saratogan Rich Schuppert's camera (Thanks Rich!) which has been modified to remove the IR blocking filter. That filter blocks much of the red H-alpha color in emission nebulae. See the old image for comparison, even though, well, there's really no comparison between this new image and the old one. <g> The transparency was pretty poor the night this was shot, but the Modified Digital Rebel did a great job of capturing the H-alpha.
The objects in this image are as follows (left to right):
Together these objects make up the "sword" region of the constellation of Orion (imagine this image rotated 90° clockwise), which looks like a fuzzy blur to the naked eye but looks stunning in binoculars or almost any telescope.
There was a bizarre anomoly in the original image which I removed using the clone tool in Photoshop. Need to run down the cause of that.
Update: The cause was an internal reflection off of the ADPT2THREAD adapter I used between the ED80's 2" socket and the Celestron focal reducer. Replacing that with the barrel half of an Orion 2" T-adapter removed the problem.
North is to the left.