The main reason for purchasing the Rokinon 135mm was a quest to shoot Rho Ophiuchi, an object I wanted to shoot for a long time. It stands out for its multiple bright colours, vivid dust lanes and even has a star cluster. After learning about it some time ago, I realized it was too big […]
Category Archives: Nebulae
IC1396 – The Elephant Trunk Nebula
A bicolor narrowband DSLR image. With a Baader 2″ Ha 7nm and a Baader 2″ Oiii 8.5nm filters from Bortle 7-8 area of my home. 6 nights in total for 25 hours of exposure! GEAR USED D5300 Ha moddedAVX mountOrion ED80 with 0.85 reducerST80/QHY224C quidingSharpcap alignment IMAGE ACQUISITION DETAILS 52 subs × 900s for Ha […]
C33 – Eastern Veil Nebula
Last Updated on October 2, 2019
M45 – The Pleiades
Last year, I travelled not far from Toronto to a Provincial Park called Forks of the Credit. It was very windy, and my guiding was horrible. In the end, I managed to only image 10 subs of M45. At the time, I did not dither, and was not using any flat frames. This year I […]
C49 – Rosette Nebula
I set out on a trip to a Bortle 2 sky to Nirvana, north of Bon Echo Provincial park. As usually, I packed everything in my MDX, and set out early evening around 4pm. The trip is close to a 3 hour drive, in addition I also need a time buffer to setup which takes […]
M20, M8 – The Lagoon and Trifid Nebulae
Right in the heart of the Milky Way lie a few popular nebulae. The Lagoon and Trifid Nebulae are so close together, that even at 510mm they fit into a crop sensor field of view. This was a quick and dirty imaging session. Guiding was horrible (up to 3.5 arcsec) and I had very little […]
Imaging the Horsehead Nebula
Another cold winter session and I’m trying out my new LifePixel modified Nikon D5300. The h-alpha response is incredible. I can finally see strong dark red signal registering. This is a great improvement over my D3200 camera. In addition, I have stopped using dark frames. It is too time consuming and a pain to accurately […]
First astroimaging session with Guiding
My first astrophotography with guiding. Its incredible how drastic the improvement is. By exposing longer, not only do you get so much more detail, but you eliminate any tracking issues that cause star trails. HDR image consisting of: 10 subs x 180 seconds8 subs x 60 seconds Stacked 9 subs x 180 seconds in DSS […]
Bortle 2 trip to Nirvana
Decided to take a trip to one of the darkest places in southern Ontario. Nirvana AKA Irvine Lake Strip is a Bortle 2 area just north of Bon Echo Provinical Park. I setup my Orion ST80 on an AVX mount with a Nikon D3200 camera. All images were tracked for around 60 seconds each, some […]
A special moment
Captured my first deep space object (dso). This was a very memorable moment. I had the DSLR connected to my Orion ST80 as I was going through the alignment procedure. Obviously with the camera live-view display, it was not possible to see anything but bright stars. But after I calibrated the mount with 2 bright […]