Celestial hemisphere:  Northern  ·  Constellation: Gemini (Gem)  ·  Contains:  Gem A  ·  IC 443  ·  IC 444  ·  Part of the constellation Gemini (Gem)  ·  The star Propus (ηGem)  ·  The star μGem
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Jellyfish w/stock dSLR + tracker, TStew
Jellyfish w/stock dSLR + tracker
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Jellyfish w/stock dSLR + tracker

Getting plate-solving status, please wait...
Jellyfish w/stock dSLR + tracker, TStew
Jellyfish w/stock dSLR + tracker
Powered byPixInsight

Jellyfish w/stock dSLR + tracker

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Description

I was really excited to shoot this one. New lens, and such a neat nebula. The lens however doesn't seem to perform as well as my prior ones. Has a bit of coma and distortions. I downscaled the image slightly. I am still happy enough with the result. Being mostly a faint Ha nebula, I knew I'd need a lot of time with an unmodified dSLR. The nebula starts out around the meridian about the time the skies are fully dark, and gets into the trees around midnight, so I was only able to image for a few hours each night and this became my first multi-night project. To get as much Ha as possible I tried a bit longer exposures - 5 minutes, which was challenging with a slightly overweight tracker. I shot wide open at f/4. My focus and tracking quality varied between the three nights I imaged, and I tried stacking them separately vs all together and found the best nebula detail using all the data. But with different temperatures each night I didn't know how to use dark frames as I normally do. I did try using darks from one night applied to the whole stack, but ended up with best stacked image using no darks at all.

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Jellyfish w/stock dSLR + tracker, TStew