One Great Night of Astrophotography!

It's really hard sometimes to image during a weeknight if I have a full workload the next day. I still do, but I prefer imaging on weekends (I can sleep in!) Friday (11/21/14) was one of those great nights....

I started by collecting Luminance filtered images of M45, the Pleiades. In my last post, I had already done M45.   http://astrochuck.blogspot.com/2014/11/hyperstar-imaging.html

 My intention was to capture more of the surrounding dust with a mosaic. Each panel was hand assembled in Photoshop CS6.  The entire image is 2.54x2.29 degrees of the sky. It originally measured 6286x5819 pixels and was 209MB!

6 panels- 7x60 seconds for Luminance, 5x60 seconds through each RGB filter.

6 Panel Luminance Layer-   (42 minutes total)

 

6 Panel Mosaic with RGB (2h 12m total)



 A project like this would have taken me several clear nights to complete and close to 24 hours in images, pre-HyperStar.  This accessory has been one of the best AP purchases I've made!  A little over 2 hours for a 6 panel mosaic!

Annotated version on Astrometry   http://nova.astrometry.net/user_images/454364#annotated


I moved from the 6 panel mosaic to NGC2264, the Cone Nebula. 17x60 seconds for Luminance, 15x60 each through RGB filters. 1h 2m total

Original image cropped



I ended the "great night of astrophotography" at 3am. I had 192 images to process.....I didn't want to overdo it :)