Van den Berg 142 in Ha on a cloudy night

[Paramount]

Hi
It was one of those nights again last night, trying to decide whether to try some imaging or not. There was patchy cloud dotted over the sky with a few clear patches and occasionally some thicker patches drifting in occasionally, I have seen this before where I live and sometimes it is worth giving it a go even if only to salvage a few frames.
I decided to give Van den Berg 142 (Elephants trunk nebula) in Cepheus a go as it had just risen high enough over my neighbours tree. I managed to get 15x10 minute unguided subframes with the TMB 115/Starlight Xpress H36 on my Paramount ME. Unfortunately 6 of the frames had to be junked because of cloud damage and the last two frames because "good light stopped play".
I did a sum combine and 0.8 gamma stretch in Maxim DL and then transferred to CS2 where I used 3 iterations of curves and local contrast enhancement using Noel's tools.
I have enclosed the widefield version and also a cropped closeup. I was having a further play with Noel's tools and added false colour, these can be seen on my website
Imaging The Heavens - Home Page
in the image gallery under nebulae
Considering the clouds and short imaging time I am quite pleased with the result
Thanks for looking
Regards
Gordon

[neilfleming]

Nice start! I like the contrast of this image. When you start up autoguiding, you should be able to invoke "dithering", or the slight offset of the image from one frame to another. That eliminates what appears to be the delicate dark streaks.

...Neil

[budguinn]

Beautiful, Gordon...one of your finest NB images

[JMS]

Did you say 10 minutes unguided? Is that possible, and get nice round stars like that?

Joe

[Paramount]

Hi Joe
It is with a Paramount ME
Regards
Gordon

[BT Technologies]

Absolutely superb Gordon... Gorgeous!!!