Hi

It was one of those nights again last night, trying to decide whether to try some imaging or not. There was patchy cloud dotted over the sky with a few clear patches and occasionally some thicker patches drifting in occasionally, I have seen this before where I live and sometimes it is worth giving it a go even if only to salvage a few frames.

I decided to give Van den Berg 142 (Elephants trunk nebula) in Cepheus a go as it had just risen high enough over my neighbours tree. I managed to get 15x10 minute unguided subframes with the TMB 115/Starlight Xpress H36 on my Paramount ME. Unfortunately 6 of the frames had to be junked because of cloud damage and the last two frames because "good light stopped play".

I did a sum combine and 0.8 gamma stretch in Maxim DL and then transferred to CS2 where I used 3 iterations of curves and local contrast enhancement using Noel's tools.

I have enclosed the widefield version and also a cropped closeup. I was having a further play with Noel's tools and added false colour, these can be seen on my website
http://www.imagingtheheavens.co.uk

in the image gallery under nebulae

Considering the clouds and short imaging time I am quite pleased with the result

Thanks for looking

Regards

Gordon

Oh, they are so vivid! great detail! inspite of cloud/light interference. one can sense the 'motion'!


I must mention this to Mr Agnew and Mr Blofeld!

To our 'non-cricketing' fellow BAUTers...my apologies.
These two gentlemen, amongst others, regularly commentate on cricket.
I suspect very much, they would be rather tickled, by Gordon's delicious turn their own phrase.

Thank you Gordon, for your diligent efforts and for sharing.

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clear skies

If you want to make an apple pie from scratch, you must first create the universe. CARL SAGAN

Very Nice Gordon, First image looks real good. Looking forward to see more from you. Clear Skies

Awesome! The elephant's trunk is one cool nebula.

Never knew that was what VdB stood for.

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You can't really tell the difference between drunken rambling and sober blogging.