This was supposed to be the start of my Ridiculously Huge and Way Too Much Work(TM) summer Milky Way project. Instead I get to start all over thanks to some stupid lens/camera artifact that showed up in all the images I took this last weekend. When finished the picture will be roughly 8 times bigger than this and will require around 10-12.5 hours of exposures. This is about the best I could edit out of the 2.5 hours of exposures I took Saturday night. This is 3 of the 5 panels for the mosaic I shot that night, each panel is a stack of 15 exposures taken with my Nikon D800E and Samyang 135mm lens on a Sky Watcher Star Adventurer tracking mount. Each exposure is 2 minutes at ISO 800 and f2. Also did 38 flat frames and 15 dark frames for calibration, done in PixInsight before exporting and stitching with PTGui followed by more editing in Photoshop.
Be still my beating heart.... Just moved into a new home and with even more snow/rain/clouds over the last 2-3 weeks I haven't had time to image since I did the Horsehead and Rosette shots. Snowed all day today and when I got home it miraculously cleared up. I hurried and setup all my equipment, ending up having the best guiding I've ever had (sub 1" RMS) and about the only thing I could image from my back patio was the Heart Nebula. Did 16 x 10 minute exposures at ISO 1600 with my Baader 7nm H-alpha filter on my Nikon D7000 (full spectrum mod), shot with my Astrotech AT65EDQ on a Sirius EQ-G mount from a bortle 8/9 zone.
A very up and down start to this crazy huge Milky Way core region project, decided to put together 4 panels this last weekend while up in the Uinta Mountains. I also tried using the NikonHacker black point firmware for my D800E for the first time, I had previously used it for my D600 and D7000, but it's always tricky to get it to load right (and stay loaded throughout the entire imaging session). Focus also drifted a bit as it cooled down into the low 40's which caused the left 2 panels to not stitch/mosaic perfectly, plus I fudged the alignment on the upper left panel, but that will be no problem once I get the rest of the panels done. Lastly, I had to take 3 different sets of flat frames because of issues with the master flat calibration of the lights, frustrating stuff. So 4 panels down, around 20-22 panels to go, this is going to be a tough project. Each panel is a stack of 7 to 10 exposures taken with my Nikon D800E and Samyang 135mm f2 lens on a Sky Watcher Star Adventurer tracking mount. Each exposure was 3 minutes at ISO 800 and f2.8.
