More time at the Lagoon

I thought I’d make a more concerted effort at M8 as the waxing moon is becoming a hindrance to deep sky photography. So I took a series of five, five-minute exposures just after the moon set at about 11:30 on July 7th. It was a beautiful night, but the first shot had suffered a bit from moon glow, and after a few shots some high moisture moved in and reduced the contrast in the remaining images. This hobby takes patients! I combined the best three of five shots to arrive at:

Canon 40D	Parameter	Notes
Lens	CPC-800 telescope	F6.3 with focal reducer
ISO	1600
Exposure	300s	Auto-guiding to 1-2 arc-seconds accuracy.
Exposures	3
Binning	none

This shot used the same “crude processing” as last time – working from the jpeg images emitted by my camera to let it do some of the processing.

This time, I used the long exposure noise reduction feature. This takes an extra image for each exposure with the shutter closed and performs the dark frame subtraction in the camera. It doubles the time required on-site, but saves me time on the processing end of things.

I find working with raw data to be tedious, and the color processing in Nebulocity never seems to work well for me. So I get a lot of value from the crude processing technique I’ve been using lately. Of course, it helps that the Lagoon is a bright nebula!