Celestial hemisphere:  Northern  ·  Constellation: Cepheus (Cep)  ·  Contains:  10 Cep)  ·  10 nu. Cep  ·  12 Cep  ·  13 Cep  ·  14 Cep  ·  15 Cep  ·  19 Cep  ·  2 Cep)  ·  2 tet Cep  ·  20 Cep  ·  3 Cep)  ·  3 eta Cep  ·  5 Cep)  ·  5 alf Cep  ·  9 Cep  ·  Alderamin  ·  B148  ·  B149  ·  B150  ·  B151  ·  B152  ·  B153  ·  B154  ·  B160  ·  B161  ·  B162  ·  B163  ·  B165  ·  B166  ·  B167  ·  And 315 more.
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Cepheus Widefield, Dan
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Cepheus Widefield

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Cepheus Widefield, Dan
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Cepheus Widefield

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Description

This image is kind of a fail, but an important lesson to me not to over-complicate a setup that is supposed to be simple. 

This was taken with the Sigma Art 105mm f/1.4 lens wide open and ASI2600MC.  What I did was try to isolate the faint OIII signals - especially the Giant Squid - with the IDAS NBZ UHS filter while also getting the broadband signals so the final image would not just be NB.  On top of all this, I also took a set of subs with no filter so I would have stars without aberrations. 

None of this really worked.  The Squid is too faint for 3.5 hours, even under dark skies with this excellent lens and camera.  Then, the aberrations on the filtered data were too bad to remove with StarXTerminator.  On top of this, the filtered data was slightly out of focus.  What I ended up getting is an image with pretty bad stars and only the faintest hint of the cool objects in this scene. 

In the future I likely won't even bother using the IDAS filters with this lens.  I think they are just too thick to work at f/1.4, especially with the APS-C chip.  Instead, I'll perfect the spacing as best as I can with no filter and try to capture mainly broadband targets.  I may try to put a thin Astronomik CLS-CCD sensor on it to isolate NB targets.

All data taken at the Cherry Springs Star Party under smoky skies.

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Cepheus Widefield, Dan