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Description
© Greg Gibbs. You may not use, replicate, manipulate, or modify this image without my permission. All Rights Reserved.

There is a story behind this one. Nathan is a beginner astrophotographer like myself. A month or so ago he challenged me to image NGC 6302 or "The Bug Nebula" as he had just imaged it and he wanted to compare images. He runs a slightly different setup to me, so a direct comparison isn't really possible. The challenge as setout was to image the nebula at my native focal length (not allowed to use magnification) for a total time of only 30 minutes. Now when I first started, thirty minutes seemed like a good amount of time on an object, but I now know that the more data you can gather on an object the better. I now aim for at least 2 hours on each object I image, so I knew it was going to be hard to pull enough detail out of the image. Another thing I knew would be hard, is that this planetary nebula is very, very, very small in my native field of view. I will have to revisit it another night with some magnification. Any way, to cut a long story short, with bad weather and an uncooperative moon it wasn't until a couple of nights ago that I finally got a chance to take up Nathans challenge. So here it is.......oh, and feel free to check out Nathans work. I for one, am watching his progress as we both experiment with astrophotography.

The Bug Nebula (NGC 6302) is a bipolar planetary nebula in the constellation Scorpius.

Canon EOS 1000D
Baader Coma Corrector
10 inch (25cm) F/4 Newtonian Reflector Telescope
NEQ6 PRO Computerised Goto Mount
Orion 80mm ShortTube Guide Scope
Synguider Autoguider
30 X 1 minute exposures (30 minutes total exposure time)
ISO 800
Dark Frames subtracted (10 X 1min)
Images stacked and alligned in Deep Sky Stacker
Final processing in Photoshop CS5.1

This is one of the images captured by my telescope on the same night as my latest star trail The other one coming soon.

Description
© Greg Gibbs. You may not use, replicate, manipulate, or modify this image without my permission. All Rights Reserved.

There is a story behind this one. Nathan is a beginner astrophotographer like myself. A month or so ago he challenged me to image NGC 6302 or "The Bug Nebula" as he had just imaged it and he wanted to compare images. He runs a slightly different setup to me, so a direct comparison isn't really possible. The challenge as setout was to image the nebula at my native focal length (not allowed to use magnification) for a total time of only 30 minutes. Now when I first started, thirty minutes seemed like a good amount of time on an object, but I now know that the more data you can gather on an object the better. I now aim for at least 2 hours on each object I image, so I knew it was going to be hard to pull enough detail out of the image. Another thing I knew would be hard, is that this planetary nebula is very, very, very small in my native field of view. I will have to revisit it another night with some magnification. Any way, to cut a long story short, with bad weather and an uncooperative moon it wasn't until a couple of nights ago that I finally got a chance to take up Nathans challenge. So here it is.......oh, and feel free to check out Nathans work. I for one, am watching his progress as we both experiment with astrophotography.

The Bug Nebula (NGC 6302) is a bipolar planetary nebula in the constellation Scorpius.

Canon EOS 1000D
Baader Coma Corrector
10 inch (25cm) F/4 Newtonian Reflector Telescope
NEQ6 PRO Computerised Goto Mount
Orion 80mm ShortTube Guide Scope
Synguider Autoguider
30 X 1 minute exposures (30 minutes total exposure time)
ISO 800
Dark Frames subtracted (10 X 1min)
Images stacked and alligned in Deep Sky Stacker
Final processing in Photoshop CS5.1

This is one of the images captured by my telescope on the same night as my latest star trail The other one coming soon.