The Flaming Star Nebula (IC 405) as seen in the back yard. This is a sum of data capture over 3 nights in November, 2012. Each light is 10 minutes at 400 ISO.

Used the Stellarvue SV4 refractor with the SV F6 flattener.

Taken with the full spectrum modified Pentax K10D camera. Used a Peltier cooler on the camera with temperatures between 5-10C. Most subs were at 8C. Baader Moon and Skyglow filter used with UV/IR filter stacked on two nights. On the final night, I used an IDAS LPR filter.

The frames were calibrated using Maxim with 256 bias frames, 95 darks, and 2, 21, or 53 flats depending on the day.

Stacked using DSS to make the mosaic. PP with PixInsight for crop, DBE, MT, ADCNR, and histogram stretch. Exported to LR3 for final touch and upload.

I'm happy with this shot. I would have liked to have better framing, but as it stands this is not bad for being captured in a suburban location. There was flexure in the RA direction. I'm working to solve this problem.

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I went back to the data captured earlier in light of my recent work with FIT debayer settings in DSS. The same data is reflected here, just processed in the same way as I did the Rosette.

A small correction, however, I must have miscounted the number of lights in the original data set. It started out with 44 lights and after I did a 90% pass with DSS, it used 37 lights. So this is with 6 hours of integration.

What is interesting here is how much of the background nebulosity is preserved. Had I actually gone to a dark sky site and not been in town there would be better contrast.

Again, this is a reasonable image given the location.

Here's the updated platesolve from PixInsight because of the different crop size and rotation:

Referentiation Matrix (Gnomonic projection = Matrix * Coords[x,y]):

+0.000055181273 +0.000528021084 -0.682498729981

-0.000527902183 +0.000055360361 +0.937149180543

+0.000000000000 +0.000000000000 +1.000000000000

Resolution ........ 1.911 arcsec/pix

Rotation .......... -95.984 deg

Focal ............. 655.15 mm

Pixel size ........ 6.07 um

Field of view ..... 2d 0' 23.8" x 1d 9' 45.2"

Image center ...... RA: 05 17 14.874 Dec: +34 23 55.63

Image bounds:

top-left ....... RA: 05 13 54.132 Dec: +35 19 58.57

top-right ...... RA: 05 14 58.762 Dec: +33 20 21.35

bottom-left .... RA: 05 19 34.473 Dec: +35 27 20.25

bottom-right ... RA: 05 20 31.170 Dec: +33 27 32.65