M42 - Orion Nebula - 20160210

The Orion Nebula (also known as Messier 42, M42, or NGC 1976) is a diffuse nebula situated south^[ of Orion's Belt in the constellation of Orion. It is one of the brightest nebulae, and is visible to the naked eye in the night sky. M42 is located at a distance of 1,344 ± 20 light years^[3][6] and is the closest region of massive star formation to Earth. The M42 nebula is estimated to be 24 light years across. It has a mass of about 2000 times the mass of the Sun.  M42 is one of the most viewed and imaged deep space objects.

This image of M2 was shot (16x10 minutes) at Ft. Griffin, Texas using an Astrotech AT6RC scope mounted on a Celestron CI-700 mount.  Autoguiding was preformed using an 80mm f7 scope piggybacked on the imaging scope.  The imaging camera was an Orion StarShoot II Pro Color camera.  The guide camera was a Mead DSI 1.  PHD2 was used for autoguiding.  Nebulosity 4 was used for imaging capture, calibration, aligning, stacking, combining and color balance of the combined image.  Photoshop 5 was used for image stretching, image vibrance, color adjustment and cropping. 

M27 - DumbBell Nebula - 20150917 - Reprocessed

 

 
 
 
 
 
The Dumbbell Nebula (also known as Apple Core Nebula, Messier 27, M 27, or NGC 6853) is a planetary nebula in the constellation Vulpecula, at a distance of about 1,360 light years.
This object was the first planetary nebula to be discovered; by Charles Messier in 1764. At its brightness of visual magnitude 7.5 and its diameter of about 8 arcminutes, it is easily visible in binoculars, and a popular observing target in amateur telescopes.

Images was captured at the 2015 Okie-Tex Star Party on September 17, 2015.  The scope used was an AT6RC mounted on a CI-700 mount and tripod.  The image was captured with an Orion StarShoot Pro II camera using Nebulosity 4 software.  Auto-guiding was preformed with a an 80mm fl 560mm scope suing PHD2.5 software. Preprocessing was done using Nebulosity 4 and finished using Photoshop CS5.  The images is made up of nine 10 minute sub-frames for a total of 90 minutes of data.   The additional processing was done in Photoshop CS5.  I applied an unsharpened layer mask the a Gaussians blur before merging the layer mask into the final image.  This additional processing brought out the nebula as be seen by comparing the two images.