New pics! One new target and one old....

First useable astropics in some time! I took these last night and then processed them today:

M42 The Great Oriuon Nebula: Back to an old favourite.

 I took this at the end of my session yesterday, with 60 exposures of 30 seconds each on ISO 800. The scope was the TS 6" and the exposure was unguided, which frankly shows. Collimation is clearly still off (grr) as there is flaring on the brighter stars, but things are working, but guiding can't come soon enough! I certainly prefer the Running Man part of this compared to earlier attempts, but the colours in the main gas cloud seem over blue. I think if I can improve the stars with guiding and get a bit better with processing, I might start to get a decent image here.

NGC2024 (The Flame Nebula), IC 434 and Barnard 33 (The Horsehead Nebula)

This is the first time I've had a go at what is one of my favourite deep sky objects. The Flame is the large yellowish flash next to the largest star, Alnitak, which is the leftmost star of Orion's belt. IC434 is the pinkish streak and the Horsehead is, faily obviously, the small horsehead shaped diffuse nebula within IC434. When I was younger, I thought the horsehead was the whole complex, which still looks to me like it might be the head of a dragon.

The Horsehead itself is a vast cloud of dust which obscures the light emmanating from the emission nebula behind.

As for the image, I'm fairly pleased considering the equipment. My DSLR is unmoddified, which means that its built in Infrared filter is obscuring much of the light from IC434, a Hydrodgen Alpha region. Also, as with the image of M42, the collimation is inaccurate, leading to star flaring. Otherwise, it's not to bad. Guiding and better collimation will tidy things up a lot, even without a modification of my DSLR!