Thorsten posted a shot of the Orion Nebula. I posted a reply about long exposures and what that entails, so I thought I'd post a shot of a Nebula that I did several years ago with a Canon 40D that was modified for astrophotography. The regular IR filter was removed and an IR Cut filter was installed. Red is the most dominant color in space due to the fact that Hydrogen is the most abundant material. An IR Cut filter allows more of the reddish hue to come through to the sensor.
However, in this shot, I had a 12 nanometer Hydrogen Alpha filter in front of the camera's sensor to allow little light other than Hydrogen Alpha to reach the sensor. It shows much more of the dust and gas this way.
Also, when it's downloaded in RAW, the whole shot is red. I converted it to B&W once in Photoshop. This is 16 ten minute exposures at ISO800 and hooked to a ten inch f4 Newtonian Reflector.
Spectacular David. Thanks for posting
Fantastic detail David! Wonder if you can combine the colored shots with this one, like setting the blending mode to overlay, soft light or straight luminosity (and then just take the color from the red frames).
Telescope is a 250/1000 then I guess?
Yes easy to do, you can blend it with the red or L channel. When shooting raw you just separate the RGB channels then recombine.
Holy cow.
thats pretty spectacular SNR for a DSLR... did you ever add RGB data to it? If not I can maybe get you RGB with an ESPIRIT 100 super APO sometime this fall/winter.
Long exposures, flats, and darks help. :-) I had thoughts of messing around with the Hubble Pallet, but after some frustrating nights, I sold all of my astrophotography gear and bought terrestrial photography gear.
My wife asked me if I'd ever start doing astrophotography again. The only way would be to have a long lost uncle leave me a pile of money. I'd set up a remote site in New Mexico with a Tak 130 FSQ and an Astro Physics mount with absolute encoders. And the camera would be a dedicated piece of hardware from SBIG or one of the other astro camera companies.
The Esprit line of scopes are quite nice, by the way.