I did get a chance to get out and do some imaging last weekend and also a few days ago. I wanted to try IC 1805 Heart Nebula. Well what can I say… other than this is one tough object. TimH told me one day that IC meant ‘I can’t C’ 🙂 Funny, but true. For this object I had to process my individual raw file and stretch with levels in order to get a bearing on where it was on the frame… then I attempted to re-frame it. This took me a good half hour. Then I started the 3min exposures at ISO 1600 totalling up to 2.5 hrs. After stacking, I saw absolutely nothing but then loaded it in PS and tried to work some magic with layer masks, curves, filters… you name it I did it. Anyway in conclusion: it is possible to image a faint hydrogen alpha target with an unmodded DSLR camera and no LP filter under mag 5.5 skies… but not without a lot of work. It was pretty much overhead at the time so that probably really helped.

Canon 40D with 80mm APO (full frame)

Holmes, Mirfak and Mellote 20 taken with the camera lens… which was piggybacked.

KerryLH