January 2010 Astrophotography Contest Winners:
WE have a TIE!

IC443/444 - Jellyfish Nebula by Paramount
and
Flame & Horse Head Nebula by Toddbenko

Hi
Here is my entry for January, the data was collected over 3 nights in December and after a couple of tweaks I decided to reprocess the whole image to highlight better the differences between the 3 emission lines. This is of IC443/444 - Jellyfish Nebula in the constellation Gemini, it is a super nova remnant thought to have occured about 20-30,000 years ago.
The image was taken with a Takahashi FSQ106ED, Starlight Xpress SXVF H36 camera on a Paramount ME autoguided and dithered using a lodestar and TMB115
Exposures are 11x20 minutes Ha, 12x20 minutes OIII and 9x20 minutes SII with Astrodon 5nm narrow band filters. The images were dark frame subtracted only and the master frames were mapped to the HST palette so SII=Red, Ha=Green and OIII=Blue
Thanks for looking
Best wishes
Gordon

I realized I guess I should figure out how to setup and post an image here. This is my image of Alnitak region from two nights of imaging on Jan 15-16. I received a new Baader 7nM Ha filter, in the first week, so I decided I would give it a whirl with Alnitak. I spent the first night imaging 15x600s OSC shots. The night wasn't very good as there was almost alway some form of cloud overhead. The second night I tried my first run at using an Ha filter with the OSC. The second night was better, not great, but better. I imaged 12x1200s usable images of Ha. I process the colour images as RGB and then converted the Ha shots to luminence and combined together to create a LRGB composite. This was my first time working with Ha data so I probably didn't get as much out of it as one probably could. Equipment was Orion Star Shoot Pro imaging camera, Skywatcher Equinox 80 OTA, EQ6pro mount autoguided with a orion SSAG on an equinox 120. Images were process with darks, flats, flat darks and bias images. Hope you enjoy and comments or suggestions are always welcome.

Todd