Despite what I thought was a very good effort, I've never been able to see the "tadpoles" when I've tried to image IC 410, but with the Hα filter performing well on emission nebulae like this one I've been anxious to try it. Sure enough, the tadpoles are easily visible in my subframes. The full moon was quite near during this session. I'm only intermittently able to get Astrotorilla plate solves when using the Hα filter, and this session was no exception to that. I initially synched on β Tau, did the goto, and imaged up to the meridian. After doing a meridian flip, I tried to use Astrotortilla to resynch and reacquire, and it just kept driving the scope farther and farther AWAY from the target. I wasted about an hour of sleep time messing with it, then finally went back out and manually aimed at β Tau, synched, and went right to the target. My chiller is still broken, but CCD temperatures started at 10 °C and fell as the night wore on.
In the revision I did a gradient wipe and stretched more aggressively. The nebula certainly shows up better, but perhaps at the expense of some detail. I'm not sure which version I like better. In the C revision I'm just having some fun with the GIF animation
Date: 7 Nov 2014
Subject: IC 410, Tadpole Nebula
Scope: AT8IN + Antares 0.5x Telereducer
Filter: Baader Planetarium 7 nm Hα
Mount: CG-5 (Synta motors, PicGoto Simplificado)
Guiding: 9x50 Finder/Guider + DSI Ic + PHD 2.3.1k (Win 7 ASCOM)
Camera: DSI IIc no chiller 5-10 °C
Acquisition: Nebulosity 3.2.1, no dither
Exposure: 41x600 s
Stacking: Neb 3, bad pixel map, bias included, no flats, OSC extract R, normalize, trans+rot align, 1.5 SD stack resize 2x.
Processing: StarTools 1.3.5.289 Crop; Develop 60.00%; HDR
ptimize; Deconvolute: 5.0 pix; Track 5.1 pix; Magic 1 pix. Photoshop CC 2014 + Carboni Astronomy Tools Hα false color dark space; Astroframe; assemble animated GIF by pasting uncolorized layer on top of false colored layer and manually aligning then making frame animation
Comments