Working on the AL Bright Nebula List

The last week has been amazing for this part of the world in that it's been clear six nights in a row. This has given me the opportunity to get my AL BN list work underway. Here are some of the results:

The Crescent Nebula

The Crescent is a bi-color shot (Ha and OIII) with synthetic green.

The Propeller

The Propeller is a fairly bright and decidedly strange looking nebula.

The Elephant's Trunk

The Elephant's Trunk is a much-imaged object, and this is one of my poorer efforts. Polar alignment was far off and the drift has caused artifacts in the image.

The Cocoon Nebula

The Cocoon is another popular target because the emission nebula at its heart is so bright. This image was composed to emphasize the dark lane (Barnard 168) extending westward from it.

Details for these images can be found on my AstroBin pages.

Most of my AL BN imaging will be in H alpha only. This is because my sky is very bright (urban/suburban) and some of the nebulae are very dim. So far I've been shooting mostly large objects with my AT65EDQ and will soon move on to smaller targets using my C925.

I've started using PHD guiding to do my polar alignment. All in all it seems to work very well, but I've found that the instructions for doing the alignment are generally incomplete. I'll see if after some experimenting I can write up something better.