The Heart Nebula IC1805
December 22nd, 2011
This has been on my target list for quite a while now, and is a favorite imaging target along with it’s partner the Soul Nebula. I have picked up both previously in my widefield image of Cassiopeia and finally got round to doing the heart justice on a couple of evenings in between the clouds last week. Ideally I would like to do a multiframe mosaic with the 250mm reflector but given the lack of clear nights recently I figured I had best stick with a single shot from the ZS66SD for now instead.
- 46 x 300 seconds
- 35 x dark, bias, flat frames
- Canon 1000d (Modified)
- Astronomik CLS-CCD
- William Optics ZS66SD
I will confess to being happy with this image though I still have a few issues which need resolving.
- Even with the MkII flattener the field still isn’t very flat with bloated stars around the edges.
- This is made worse by the poor focusser on the ZS66 allowing flop and flex on the draw tube so it’s not centrally aligned with the objectivelens.
- The background due to light pollution and camera noise mostly is a mess. I need to investigate better ways of managing this with Pixinsight.
Fixing the first item requires either a better flattener or a better telescope entirely, both options I would rather avoid. However sorting out the focusser on the ZS66 would really help, however I have tried sorting it out before and never quite managed to get it much better than it currently is. The last issue needs to be managed by better work with the Background Normalization and DBE tools in Pixinsight, expect a reprocessed version at some point soon as I work that out.
