Saturday, January 28, 2012

The Horsehead Nebula

This target has always been fascinating to me.  A combination of a dark nebula that looks like a seahorse and the bright flame nebula that looks like an aspen leaf. One of those targets you see pictures of and can't believe they really exist.


I have made various attempts to image this with different equipment.  This was one of the better results I have obtained so far and was taken last night at Mansfield Dam in Austin.  This site is not very dark, much less so than my home location in Georgetown.

This image was taken with my 80mm refractor (Orion ED80T-CF) using a QSI-540ws CCD through an Astronomiks 12nm H-alpha filter.  The image is a stack of four 15 minute exposures for a total of 1 hour of data.