Comet Neowise and Venus


home
history
equipment
visual observing sessions
imaging sessions
image post-processing
"The Imperative of Night" narrative
contact us

Welcome to taosastronomer.com!

offering local "hands-on" observing
(visual and imaging) sessions and instruction
viewing and imaging from Rabbit Valley Observatory
a dark sky location on the mesa just west of Taos, NM

 

NGC2403

Image obtained March 19-20, 2017 through RVO's Explore Scientific’s 127mm ES127ED APO refractor resulting in an 952mm f/7.5 optical system and incorporating a Hotech field flattener -- using a Baader-modified Canon XSi DSLR and BackyardEOS image-acquisition software – 17 of 20 carefully selected and stacked 360-second RGB frames combined with multiple dark, flat and bias calibration frames shot at ISO 800 and totaling more than 240 minutes (102 minutes effective luminance) were used to create this image; optics driven by the Losmandy G-11 mount equipped with Ovision's precision RA worm gear, guided with a ZWO ASI 120MM Monochrome CCD camera through a 60mm guidescope using PhD2 guiding software and post-processed with DeepSkyStacker, CCDStack2 (DDP and deconvolution), GradientXTerminator, NeatImage noise reduction and Photoshop CS3 s/w. (This photograph has been enlarged and cropped.)

Photographer's note: It is informative to compare this image above, taken with the superior Explore Scientific apochromatic refractor (3 optical elements, virtually no false color fringing) with my previous images of similar objects, like M81/M82. Those previous images were captured with a high quality but nevertheless a 2 optical element Williams' Optics Megrez achromatic refractor. The difference in the detail (especially noting the stars' lack of significant fringing coloration (halos around stars) and general resolution) is extraordinary, due in part to the larger objective lens -- 127mm vs. 80mm -- but also due to the optical type (apochromatic vs. achromatic). Click this link for a discussion of telescopic lens optics.

 

[copyright Rabbit Valley Observatory/Willis Greiner, 2017 -- all rights reserved]

 


home
history
equipment
visual observing sessions
imaging sessions
image post-processing
"The Imperative of Night" narrative
contact us

 

(all content copyright 2015-2019 Willis Greiner Photography, all rights reserved)