On Saturday night I was able to make time to do some imaging. I decided to image a section of the Veil Nebula. I ran a LRGB session of the Veil Nebula which finished early in the night so I thought I would try a Ha image. I have never imaged through the Ha filter and was interested to see my test results. Since this would be a long exposure it would be a good test of my auto guiding system as well. The LRGB run was 3 images at 600 sec images for each filter with guiding on a 9.5 mag star. My guide exposures were between.10 and .35 sec. The Ha filter required 2 sec guiding exposures meaning the AO would run at .5 Hz, I was interested to see how that all worked. The Ha image was to be a 1500 sec exposure so my system would have to guide well for 25 mins. The image above is the result. This is 1 exposure at 1500 sec Ha with an auto dark, no flat field. The only post processing was de-blomming in DL and levels adjustment in PS CS5. I was pleased with the resultant image and the guiding of my system, good structure in the nebula and nice round stars. PS- the LRGB images has not been processed yet. Enjoy and keep the telescopes pointed up.
Brad
