M27 'outshines' the moon (Tom Gray)

M27 'outshines' the moon

Glorious days, but the first clear night for a while - astronomers take an inverse or perhaps perverse view of the weather. I decided to try and improve my camera lens photography using my DSI II OSC and an old Pentax 70-210mm SLR lens, mounted on my 2080 LX5, with rough polar alignment and no autoguiding. Images were combined and aligned in Autostar Envisage.

M27 the dumbell nebula is a bright planetary nebula in Vulpecula, which makes an easy imaging target. Under an 18 day old moon, the sky was all but washed out, and imaging would be pointless but for the 'magic' of narrow band filters.

Despite achieving a good focus using my homemade Bahtinov mask (etched on an old CD case), the image is 'soft' which I expect has more to do with relatively poor seeing - a turbulent atmosphere after a hot day, not that I'm complaining...

I like the wider field, and the HII and OIII regions stand out clearly, with hints of the outer envelope that barely contains this giant expanding gas bubble, estimated to be growing at 17 miles per second! Dual band filters tend to mess up the colours of background stars, but as ever I'm impressed with the processing powers of Startools, which effortlessly, 'magically' extracts the detail - I used masking, heavy deconvolution to bring out the nebula and heavy contrast to suppress background noise (I was imaging at 20+ Celsius).

I am hoping to improve resolution by using my DSI III pro, but cannot achieve focus with my Mogg adapter, due to the filter slide; I will have to find something else to repurpose.

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Altair Astro 183 M/C Hypercams
Optolong L-eNhance filter
The OSC Club (One Shot Camera)
UK Astro-Imaging
Camera Lens Astrophotography

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