IC 1318 Gamma Cygni Nebula

 I managed to image all 110 Messier objects. It took me 1 year to complete.

https://sites.google.com/site/astrochuck123/home/miscpictures

updated set on Flickr:

http://www.flickr.com/photos/astrochuck/sets/72157628830401895/

 The first 95 I found & imaged with my old 8" SCT & an ST-80T "guide scope" piggybacked. The old SCT fork mount is non computerized, non- GOTO. This made finding all these a challenge. It took me a year to complete, starting in August 2011 and completed August 2012. Most of the images were done quickly and I planned to reimage several of them. One of these I found interesting was M29 in Cygnus.

 

I started out on 5/25/13 hoping to reimage M29. Due to a full moon I started with my Hydrogen-Alpha filter. 6 exposures, 20 minutes each.Open cluster M29 can be seen in the highlighted box

2 hours through Hydrogen-Alpha filter, 6 exposures. Taken with AT65EDQ refractor & QHY9M ccd

After a little research, I found the nebulosity seen to the left of M29 is part of IC 1318. IC 1318, the Gamma Cygni Nebula covers an area of about 4x7 degrees. My field of view with the AT65EDQ refractor & QHY9M ccd is 2.42 x1.4 degrees. So I decided to do a mosaic project.

So far I completed 4 panels with the hydrogen-alpha filter, 3 exposures at 20 minutes each for 1 hour per panel. 4 panels seen side by side before arranging into a mosaic

 

I used Photoshop CS6 to manually align the 4 new images

 

 

.

So far I managed to add Green & Blue filtered images to the original panel, the M29 panel. I used 3x10 minute exposures for each color

With no clear skies since, I grew impatient and added the "completed" M29 panel to the 4 panel Hydrogen Alpha mosaic. I created synthetic star colors using photoshop:

 

Hopefully soon I can add real Blues & Greens and continue expanding this new mosaic project. Stay tuned!!!