Horsehead and Flame Nebula
Finally got some clear skies to do some shooting, drove an hour to a reservoir outside Salt Lake City to get out of the horrible air pollution and fog that's been developing at night. It was COLD, when I finally threw in the towel it was -9 degrees Fahrenheit and pretty much everything was frozen solid, definitely the coldest I've ever shot in.
I wanted to test out my Tamron 150-600mm lens with my now full-spectrum modified Nikon D7000 with some guiding on my Star Adventurer tracking mount. I was going to do a mosaic of the Flame and Horsehead Nebula over to the Running Man and Orion Nebula, did 2 hours of the Flame and Horsehead and then moved the lens fov over to the Orion/Running Man and started having tons of problems with the guiding. By that time Orion was up near the meridian and that was causing havoc with the large lens on the modest Star Adventurer. I ended up flipping over to Andromeda and getting some shots of that, I'll try to post that later.
Acquisition Details:
Nikon D7000 (full spectrum with a UV/IR Cut filter added) + Tamron 150-600mm lens at 300mm
Sky Watcher Star Adventurer tracking mount guided by Orion 50mm mini guide scope and ToupTek Guidecam via PHD2
30 x 4 minute exposures at f6.3 and ISO 1600
120 Bias frames and 40 Flat frames applied
Calibrated, Debayered, Registered and Stacked in PixInsight
Geometry crop followed by LinearFit to red channel, Dynamic Background Extraction, SCNR on green channel, screen transfer function to take out of linear state, and contrast/saturation curves. Exported as 16-bit Tiff to Photoshop.
In Photoshop I did a bit more curves enhancement and a minor star size reduction and sharpening.
Kind of disappointed in this lens, the flair on the brighter stars with the coma at f6.3 has me shaking my head, I hadn't noticed that problem before and it's a bit...ugly. Considering selling this lens and just picking up a high quality 80mm refractor with better optics.
