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A Whale of a time getting to the Elephant Trunk

As those of you who know me probably know, I prefer nebulas to galaxies. No real reason, I just do. Not that I dislike galaxies but I enjoy imaging nebulae a lot more. So as galaxy season goes into...

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Iris Nebula

I have been wanting to do some dark nebula imaging for a while, but had read about how difficult processing would be for such images so I held off for a while until I had the means to do longer subs....

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Eastern Veil and building an image

My latest image project has been the Eastern Veil Nebula in narrowband. I shot the SII and OIII first, both binned 2x2 and with 20 min subexposures, followed by two nights of Ha, binned 1x1 also with...

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Summer project

Have you ever wanted to image for 8.5 days? I don't mean take a vacation and take a photo sometime throughout each day - I mean 8.5 days, 200+ hours, of cumulative exposure time for one photo. This is...

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Somewhere between a dream and reality .... Atlantis

January 12, 1997: 15 year old me is sitting in the wee hours of the morning with my family on the grass in Florida staring at a platform lit up by spot lights. The excitement builds with each reducing...

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STS-135 NASA Tweetup. The Final launch.

  The pure exhaustion of the travel day was enough to make anyone climb into a cozy bed and sleep for days. Not this time. 26 hrs since I woke for the travel from my home in England to Orlando,...

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When the dream is reality

A week ago I stood on the shore of the Turning Basin at Kennedy Space Center's launch Press Site and watched a Space Shuttle hurtle four Americans into space for the last time. NASA, as the Robert...

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North America & a Pelican

I have been continuing work on my narrowband mosaic project. I first started imaging on this project on May 21, 2011. In the early morning hours of August 7 I finally got 1/3 of the way through by...

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Shortlisted for Royal Astronomy Photographer of the Year 2011

On a whim and just to say I threw my name in the hat I submitted 5 photos from the past year into the Royal Astronomy Photographer of the Year competition put on by the Royal Observatory at Greenwich....

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Two years and a Pelican

Two years ago I could not even tell you what someone meant if they said "narrowband image" let alone expect that I would, in a relatively short amount of time, learn enough about astrophotography that...

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I need more power Scotty! . . . aka "How to build the AstroPig 140"

I have been increasingly frustrated by my power tanks lately, mainly in that I have to use 2-3 of them just to get a full night of imaging with my scope, ccd, filter wheel, auto guider, and dew...

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Nikon D7000 for astrophotography: Review

Note: This review can be downloaded as a pdf at: http://www.eprisephoto.com/nikon-d7000.pdf   Although my first astrophotos were taken with a DSLR I quickly steered clear of DSLR astrophotography for...

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Beta Actions available for testing

I have a few actions up for beta testing. I will do this occasionally as I am developing some for Annie's Astro Actions or just for my own personal use in processing (which is how these came about). I...

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Parfocal filter test #1

I always wondered this, but as I didn't have a motorized filter with readable steps (until now) I wasn't able to do any testing on my filters previously. Since the moon is lovely and bright tonight...

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Blogging fell by the wayside

I have been incredibly busy since Christmas and unfortunately forgot to make any posts as a result. I have done some astrophotography and enjoyed the few clear nights England provided. Here are a few...

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A full week of astrophotography in the Haute-Alpes, France

I just spent a week down at Olly Penrice's astronomy mecca in Southern France. Crazy me drove down with all of my gear (the whole trip both ways and what driving we did during the day down there...

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Bringing out the dust

I finally got a chance to shoot the Orion Nebula for the first time since I started imaging. After months and months of clouds and full moons during the only clear evenings I got a perfect evening. By...

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Step by Step processing of the Orion Nebula

I have gotten several requests as to how I processed my latest M42. Before I go into that I want to mention that my processing of this was done using Adobe Photoshop CS5 and includes a few different...

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Comparing NB filters

I just recently got a great deal on a couple Astrodon 3nm filters (H-alpha and OIII) which I am very excited about. I have had 12nm filters for a while now (Astronomik), which I have loved and are...

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Staunton River State Park, an IDA Dark Sky Park in our backyard

The Charlotte Observer and Raleigh News and Observer just published my article about the latest IDA Dark Sky Park, Staunton River State Park. This new Silver-tiered Dark Sky Park is a fantastic...

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December 2010's total Lunar Eclipse

As it would so happen, I moved out of the US just before the total eclipse of 2010. Amidst the clouds and current snowy/icy weather in England I was not expecting to be able to see anything,...

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The argument about Bias Frames

Until now I have not really used bias frames in my preprocessing (I attempted on the first few imaging attempts ever since I was told I should but quickly stopped using them). I decided to shoot some...

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First image in England and of 2011

Despite a lot of rain and clouds I have gotten a couple (literally, only 2 since we moved here in December) of clear nights to image. Using my new autoguider (Starlight XPress Lodestar) I am now able...

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Color to M51

Finally got another clear night and was able to grab 100 minutes each of RGB. Here is the final (for now) LRGB version: You can see it larger on My Flickr

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First Bicolor Narrowband Image

I have imaged various objects in just Ha before, but just got to use my OIII filter for the first time and am attempting my first bi-color processing. I am hoping to get more hours of both Ha and OIII...

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Astrophotography with a bright moon

Every month astrophotographers cringe at two words "full moon" as the great glowing orb in the sky makes it very difficult to image. Narrowband or photographing the moon are the two main options if...

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Firing back up the blog

It's been a few years since I have blogged and in that time we have moved to Idaho, we bought some acreage in pretty dark skies (though by a small town for convenience), I built my dome observatory...

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