The region of sky where the Veil Nebula resides is packed with stars as it's right in the disk of our Milky Way galaxy. The image below is of the western portion of the very large nebula complex. It complements the image of the eastern portion of the Veil I took the previous night. I'll have to do a mosaic if I ever hope to get the entire complex into one image, which brings me to my next point...
Technology is making me lazy! With the various astrophotography-related plug-ins available for Photoshop, it's getting real easy to not spend the time I should be spending on getting better and MORE raw light frames and calibration frames. This image, for example, does not represent a really well-planned and thought-out image. I simply framed the subject, focused, and took a series of 15-minute light frames. I skipped taking darks, flats, and bias frames because I knew MaximDL's bad pixel removal tool, Russ Croman's Gradient XTerminator, and the HLVG and Noise Ninja plug-ins for Photoshop would come to the rescue. While this is a pretty image, it's time for me to get back to planning, calculating, and spending the time to do things right! (In my defense, I'll also blame the fact that many of the nights lately have been cloudy and opportunities for extended imaging sessions have been rare. Yeah, that's it.)
Technology is making me lazy! With the various astrophotography-related plug-ins available for Photoshop, it's getting real easy to not spend the time I should be spending on getting better and MORE raw light frames and calibration frames. This image, for example, does not represent a really well-planned and thought-out image. I simply framed the subject, focused, and took a series of 15-minute light frames. I skipped taking darks, flats, and bias frames because I knew MaximDL's bad pixel removal tool, Russ Croman's Gradient XTerminator, and the HLVG and Noise Ninja plug-ins for Photoshop would come to the rescue. While this is a pretty image, it's time for me to get back to planning, calculating, and spending the time to do things right! (In my defense, I'll also blame the fact that many of the nights lately have been cloudy and opportunities for extended imaging sessions have been rare. Yeah, that's it.)
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| Western Veil Nebula or Cirrus Nebula AG Optical 10" f/3.8 Newtonian telescope and FLI ML11002-C camera 45-minute exposure (3 x 15 minute subexposures) |
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