August 22 2006 - Thin Moon and M42

M42 (luminance) Taken with my Meade 10" LX200 and Canon G3 4mp digital camera. A Maxview 40mm eyepeice was used. Camera settings were 1x zoom, 12 x 15 sec exposures (180 sec equiv) @ ISO400. No guiding was employed. IRIS was then used to stack the 12 frames. Conditions were horrible as Orion was low in the horizon and right beside a street lamp so I was glad with the results. Both image J and photoshop were also used t resize, reduce an great amount of noise and brightness (due to street light) and bring out a bit more of the nebula. Please click on photo to enlarge.



Left picture: Single M42 shot unprocessed, 15 second exposure @ISO400, 1x zoom 10" LX200 SCT. As you can see in this image, the sky brightness and noise was terrible. This was the direct cause of the street lamp which was quite literaly about 3 moon widths away. It was also fairly close to the horizon and seeing was not great.

Right image: Is the procesed stackked frames with the same settings as the luminance photo above. The only difference here is that it was processed using the RGB method on iris. As you can see the processing removed much of the noise and background brightness but left some of the fainter nebula visible. Processing and stacking images can make a huge difference as is evident from the original to the finished picture! Please click on photo to enlarge.



The Trapezium taken with my Meade 10" LX200 and Canon G3 4mp digital camera. A Maxview 40mm eyepeice was used. Camera settings were 4x zoom, 6 x 15 sec exposures (90 sec equiv) @ ISO400. No guiding was employed. IRIS was then used to stack the 6 frames. Please click on photo to enlarge.



This image of the moon was taken in almost broad daylight! It is less then 24 hours away from new moon thus was very thin indeed. Finding such a moon in daylight is fairly challenging if you dont know where to look. It helped that I have an LX200 which can automaticaly take me to the moon but even then through the finderscope i could barely see something. Photographing it was even more of a challenge due to te bright blue sky background which made the moon almost invinsible in the eepeice. This photo was taken with a 10" LX200 SCT and my canon G3 4mp camera set at 1x zoom and ISO50. A maxview 40mm eyepeice was used. The original photo, you could just see a slight hint of the moon so I had to edit it to try and bring out the moon more and darken the background too. It was no easy task and the picture looks "unreal" but either way you can see how thin the moon was. This was one single frame. Phot shop and imageJ were used to try and bring out the moon. Click to enlarge.