Eta Carinae and Lambda Centaurus area, vertical format (north up) with Canon20Da and Canon 135mm L lens at f/2.8 for 2-frame mosaic, each frame a stack of 4 x 6 minute exposures at ISO400. Stitched together with Photoshop CS3 and Auto-Align and Auto-Blend functions. Taken from Coonabarabran, NSW, March 2008. Shows Eta Carinae, Southern Pleiades, NGC 3532, NGC 3293, NGC 3766 and Lambda Centauri nebulosity and many other smaller clusters and nebulas.
Comet Holmes, 17P, taken Nov 1, 2007 on excellent night. Taken with A&M 105mm apo refractor at f/5 with Borg 0.85x compressor/field flattener on SkyWatcher HEQ5 mount. Canon 20Da camera at ISO400. Composite of 4 min, 2min, 1min, 30sec, 15sec, and 7 sec exposures, each exposure being a stack of 3 to 4 identical exposures. Registered and stacked in Photoshop (HDR mode did not produce usable result, so manually composited with sucessively smaller masks to reveal short exposure content around nucleus. Contrast exaggerated with Curves to bring out very faint tail structure. North up, so tail to the S and SW.Nucleus is dot at upper left of inner coma, other star in inner coma at right is a field star
Double Cluster in Perseus, taken Oct 14, 2007 with 5-inch apo refractor at f/6 with Canon 20Da at ISO 800 for stack of 4 x 8 minute exposures. Some haze. Used ST402 guider.
