[Paramount]

Hi all

Well according to the records August has been the wettest month on record and I can believe that. The weather was looking a bit more promising last night and following a suggestion from a fellow imager I had another go at NGC 6992 but this time I added some OIII data to it to make a bi-colour image. Luckily the sky stayed cloud free long enough to get 9x10 minutes unguided subframes for each channel. The seeing was poor due to very faint mist in the air later in the evening and the sky never got totally dark despite no moon being present. The subframes were dark subtracted (10 darks), then aligned and combined using median combine in Maxim DL and then the two resulting master frames were colour combined in Maxim DL using Ha for red and OIII for green. The resulting colour image was then processed in Photoshop CS2

I have enclosed the full widefield version as well as a cropped closeup

Thanks for looking and hoping for a better September

Best wishes

Gordon



Since posting this image I had a couple of suggestions about adding data to obtain a blue channel so I have tried two methods
1. Creating a synthetic blue channel from the red and green channels using Noel's tools in Photoshop CS2
2. Using existing OIII in the blue channel and creating an RGB image in Maxim DL and then processing it in Photoshop CS2
I have posted the images on my website Imaging The Heavens - Home Page in the nebulae section of the image gallery along with the other images for comparison, I would be interested to know what people think

[slotdrag]

very nice

[sgcullen]

Very nice Veil Nebula work. I wanted to share an image created by my friend Adam Block who runs an imaging workshop on Mt. Lemmon in Tucson as part of the University of Arizona SkyCenter. Adam is one of the most well known imagers...you can find his work in the astronomy magazines all the time. This particular image was also an Astronomy Photo Of the Day by NASA. I post Adam's work as an example for us all to aspire to.

[slotdrag]

What happened to the bright star its not there in the top picture.

[Paramount]

Originally Posted by slotdrag

What happened to the bright star its not there in the top picture.

Hi
The reason the star is not present in the top picture is because my image is of the eastern part of the veil nebula (network nebula) - NGC 6992 and the image posted from Adam Block is of the western part of the veil nebula (witches broomstick) - NGC 6960, if you look in google and type in the veil nebula in the search I am sure you will find a complete image of the whole nebula complex which also includes a third element called Pickerings triangle which sits in between the two. The whole complex sometimes referred to as the Cygnus loop is quite big and either requires a camera lens to image all of it at once or a very short focus astrograph such as the Takahashi epsilon or FSQ 102, the only other way to image all of it is to use mosaic
Best wishes
Gordon