Work In Progress Astrophotography

Here are a few new amateur astronomical images I've been working on. These are very much a work in progress, in particular with handling the sky background when building up large mosiac images. These were taken using the iTelescope T05 (a 250mm Takahashi reflector) and T20 (a 106mm APO refractor) telescopes in New Mexico over a series of nights this year, and processed using various python tools I wrote for the purpose.

A 5x5 degrees SII, H-alpha and OIII mosaics of the Cygnus Loop supernova remnant, taken with T20. The struggle with the images were taken when the Moon was up, even though the were taken over several days. Weather has been crummy at the NM site this summer, so you make do with what you get. But the sky backgrounds need some additional work.

The other images are of the NGC 6888 (shown previously), and M82 and/or M81, each taken separately with T05, and mosaiced together in some versions. The depth of the different images and bands varies a lot, for example there are 25 5-minute H-alpha images of M82, but only 6 5-minute H-alpha images of M81. I also messed up by using the Johnson-Cousins B filter on M81 when I've used the Astrodon Blue on M82.