The Horsehead Nebula in Orion
Speed test with 10" f/3.9 Astrograph
Uploaded 1/31/16

 
 Back in the "old"
            film days, you had to have very transparent conditions, dark
            skies and at least 10 minutes with a fast scope to get any image
            at all of the Horse head nebula in Orion - Barnard 92. As a demonstration
            of what my water cooled CCD with microlenses can do with our
            new fast Orion Astrograph (with Baader MPCC coma corrector),
            I took a series of images of this object, and discovered that
            even a 1 second exposure (binned 3 x 3) was recording it quite
            well. This is going to be a fantastic combination for deep sky
            and comet imaging! Nothing more a gamma curve stretch was used
            here.

            
1 second exposure

            
2 second exposure

            
4 second exposure

            
8 second exposure


And of course, we need color images too - here is 1 second each filter, red - blue - green combined to a color image:


            
1 second exposure
per RGB channel



            
8 seconds exposure
per RGB channel:


Instrument:  10" f/3.9 Orion Astrograph Newtonian
Mount:  Astrophysics 1200 QMD
CCD Camera:  SBIG 10XME NABG with Enhanced Water Cooling
Guider: Meade DSI Pro  w/80mm piggyback refractor
Exposure:  1s to 24s for color
AstroDon RGB Combine Ratio:  1: 1.05: 1.2
Location:  Payson, Arizona, Elevation:  5150 ft.
Sky:  Seeing FWHM = 3 arcsec , Transparency 9/10
Outside Temperature:  25 F
CCD Temperature:  -20 C
Image Processing Tools: 
Maxim DL:  Calibration, deblooming (Starizona Debloomer), aligning, stacking
PixInsight:  Curves, Deconvolution
Photoshop CS2:  Curves, Color Correction, Gradient removal (Grad Xterminator), Cleanup

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