A very first attempt of shooting the Jellyfish nebula (IC 443) from my backyard!
The Jellyfish nebula is a spectacular galactic supernova remnant in the
Gemini constellation, located near
Propus (also called
Eta Geminorum, which appears of a
red-orange bright colour also if looked at the ocular with our own eyes).
In order to get as much as possible even elusive details, I decided, as a very first project, to shoot at this wonderful deep-sky object on multiple nights.
Of course, two basic requirements had to be respected: the first one being to find with enough precision the focus position. For that purpose I decided to built a Bahtinov mask for my 100mm diameter refractor with cardboard material; below is the result:
In order to find manually the focus position with enough precision, I used the Bahtinov mask so built and the Bahtinov aid coming within the APT Astro Photography Tool
software, in order to calibrate the focus position with the diffraction spikes computation.
The second one has been to maintain the camera at the proper angle during the session and for that purpose I just built a goniometric scale with paper placed in my camera adaptor as represented in this second picture
:
The astrophotography session has been realized on the following dates (so four nights):
- February: 1st, 8th, 22nd
- March: 3rd
for a total of around 7 hours and 44 minutes of integration!
Any comment or suggestion is much appreciated!
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