Flame Nebula and Horsehead Nebula

I was out with a couple of other crazies last night photographing the stars. Between the three of us we had a gazillion things go wrong with our gear because of the cold. When I finally went home at 11:30 pm the temperature was -25 Celsius with the wind chill factor! As I've written here in my Flickr gallery at previous times, you don't have to be crazy to do this hobby in the Canadian winter, but it sure helps!

 

Camera: Nikon D5500 unmodified

Lens: Nikon 300/f4 ED

Aperture: f5.1 using stepping rings as aperture mask

ISO: 100 images at 1600, and 70 images at 3200

Exposure: 170 x 30 seconds = 1.4 hours total integration time

Tracker: Sky Watcher Star Adventurer

Sky conditions: dark clear sky, good seeing

Pre-stacking: Raw files converted to 16-bit TIFF files in Adobe Camera Raw in Photoshop

Stacking: Deep Sky Stacker

Processing: Photoshop CS5

 

I'm not really happy with the quality of this image - its too grainy and not perfectly focused - but it's a start anyway, especially at these insane temperatures. I really wanted to do 60-second exposures for better fine details, but the AAA batteries on my intervalometer quit from the cold forcing me to use the internal 30-second timer in the camera. The batteries quit even though they were almost new plus were wrapped in a hand warmer. I'm getting super-power Lithium batteries today for our next outing tonight.

Done