IC-434
Horsehead Nebula
I
was wondering whether it could be possible to capture this difficult target
with my ETX-125. ETX has nice optics, but fairly modest mounting allows just
short exposures in prime focus.
Well,
it seems to be possible, but just barely. The horsey
is there, but you have to know what to look for in the following pictures.
This
image was captured in my light polluted backyard with DSI in ETX-125 prime
focus, 0.3x focal reducer and K3CCDTools 3. Exposure time was 30s, which seems
to be the upper limit for this system. Patience was required, since just about
every 10th frame had acceptable quality due to guiding inaccuracy. 20 best
frames were selected, dark-frame subtracted and stacked from out of 193
original frames. Final adjustments were done in Photoshop CS2.
Figure 1:
IC-434 Jan 16 2007 21:54 UTC - A trace of the head just and just visible, a bit to the left from the
center - muzzle up, nape down
Figure 2: The same picture
in B&W, processed without deBayer filtering in
K3CCDTools. The limiting magnitude is around 17-18.
