Ad Astra Observatory

This is my first HaRGB shot. It’s a combination of grayscale luminance data that I captured while camping at Coyote Lake, CA over the weekend, and color data that I captured from the backyard on Tuesday night. Looking back, I probably should have done it the other way around. Oh well.

Also, while camping, I was using the Canon 300D DSLR, but the AC adapter for the 350D showed up Tuesday, so I switched to the 350D for the RGB data.

Because the 300D and 350D have different pixel counts (6mpx vs 8mpx) but the same size CCD (APS-size), the 350D magnifies the image slightly given the same optics. All this is to say that I had to do some scaling and rotating in Photoshop to get the two images to line up. It’s enough to make a person want a filter wheel.

The Ha data is 5 full hours, fifteen 20m subframes. That’s close to a record for my deepest exposure yet.
The RGB data is a little over 2 hours, twenty-six 5m subframes.

I’m not sure how to calculate a “total” exposure time off of that. shrug.

This is a full-frame crop of the original (as much of the full frame as was still useful after rotating)