Heart Nebula

[mountainjunkie]

Should have posted this last given the holiday...but better late than never.

The Heart Nebula

Heart Nebula by matt gates, on Flickr

 

[Space Face]

Pretty easy to see why it's called that. Quite mesmeric.

 

[Jeff15]

Very nice......

 

[K9Kirk]

Very nice shot and very pretty.

 

[Susan Will]

Beautiful!

 

[photoflyer]

What equipment did you use? I'm trying to get a sense of what I can expect to capture with my gear. Of course being in Virginia, even when I go to the cabin at the lake or shoot from the Skyline Drive cannot make up for dry clear skies. Just got the Optolong L Extreme last week. Hoping it will help. But even with good seeing and equipment, I have a long way to go on the learning curve.

 

[mountainjunkie]

What equipment did you use? I'm trying to get a sense of what I can expect to capture with my gear. Of course being in Virginia, even when I go to the cabin at the lake or shoot from the Skyline Drive cannot make up for dry clear skies. Just got the Optolong L Extreme last week. Hoping it will help. But even with good seeing and equipment, I have a long way to go on the learning curve.

I'm on the "beginner" end of the spectrum when it comes to deep space photography gear: I use a D750 attached to a William Optics Z61 on a Skyguider Pro and recently added a small guide scope to the mix. The mount is the weakest link in my setup at this point especially with the weight of the guide scope added. I've been able to get up to 3 minute exposures with everything dialed in as well as possible but that's really pushing it. With that said this image was only around 90 min of total exposure time, so I know I should be able to pull in a lot more on detail on targets once I gain some more patience and it warms up a bit (I live at 8,200' elevation).

I live in what I would call at Bortle 4/5 zone so while not a super dark site by any means I definitely have an advantage over living directly in a large metroplex (I'm 20-30 miles from Denver). I use an the L-pro for galaxies/reflection Nebula and the L-enhance for emission Nebula like this one. (With that said galaxies are quite a stretch with my small scope and I haven't tried any yet with the guiding setup) Of course the L-extreme filter came out a month or so after I bought my L-enhance. lol. I'm curious to see what you come away with using it. From my research it seems filters like these are a almost a requirement if you aren't in a dark area, but using a requires longer exposures as well so the mount and your max exposure time will be even more critical.

 

[LightSpeed666]

It's a " Wow " image for me.
I wish I knew how to do this. I think , you're good.
Real nice man. I mean it.

 

[photoflyer]

What equipment did you use? I'm trying to get a sense of what I can expect to capture with my gear. Of course being in Virginia, even when I go to the cabin at the lake or shoot from the Skyline Drive cannot make up for dry clear skies. Just got the Optolong L Extreme last week. Hoping it will help. But even with good seeing and equipment, I have a long way to go on the learning curve.

I'm on the "beginner" end of the spectrum when it comes to deep space photography gear: I use a D750 attached to a William Optics Z61 on a Skyguider Pro and recently added a small guide scope to the mix. The mount is the weakest link in my setup at this point especially with the weight of the guide scope added. I've been able to get up to 3 minute exposures with everything dialed in as well as possible but that's really pushing it. With that said this image was only around 90 min of total exposure time, so I know I should be able to pull in a lot more on detail on targets once I gain some more patience and it warms up a bit (I live at 8,200' elevation).

I live in what I would call at Bortle 4/5 zone so while not a super dark site by any means I definitely have an advantage over living directly in a large metroplex (I'm 20-30 miles from Denver). I use an the L-pro for galaxies/reflection Nebula and the L-enhance for emission Nebula like this one. (With that said galaxies are quite a stretch with my small scope and I haven't tried any yet with the guiding setup) Of course the L-extreme filter came out a month or so after I bought my L-enhance. lol. I'm curious to see what you come away with using it. From my research it seems filters like these are a almost a requirement if you aren't in a dark area, but using a requires longer exposures as well so the mount and your max exposure time will be even more critical.

I thought you might have been guiding. Once I master my current setup I will try guiding.

 

[paigew]

This is just so beautiful. Does the nebula always have the same shape?

 

[mountainjunkie]

It's a " Wow " image for me.
I wish I knew how to do this. I think , you're good.
Real nice man. I mean it.

Thank you, I appreciate the positive feedback! It's quite a process to learn to do this stuff, and can be quite frustrating when your patience runs out. It's also easy to be overly critical of myself after spending too much time seeing what the "pros" put up on social media

 

[mountainjunkie]

I thought you might have been guiding. Once I master my current setup I will try guiding.

I will say the other than getting the balance dialed in with the guide scope attached, adding guiding to the process was probably the easiest aspect to learn so far. PHD2 took maybe 20-30 minutes to get set up the first time, now just takes a couple clicks.

 

[mountainjunkie]

This is just so beautiful. Does the nebula always have the same shape?

For as long as us and many of our descendants will be able to see it, yes. This one is 7,500 light years away so what we're seeing happened that far in the past. It also has a radius of 165 light years...hard to wrap your mind around how large that is!

 

[nokk]

stunning shot.