Taken near Mt Pinos, this was my first full SoCal imaging experience. Atop a mountain over 8,000′ in elevation, surrounded by pine trees, I felt like I was in good-old majestic California again. At dusk, deer hunters came to my camp to warn me of a 400 lb bear just 150 yards away. As much as I wanted to check out Smokey, I was a little freaked out alone up there. I had no canisters to speak of.. so I just put my dry foods in a Pelican case, and placed the ice chest about 25 yards from the car. No incidents 🙂
NGC 1333 was tough. After attempting to process this LRGB image, I am ready to give PixInsight a try. I want to pull more of that “Rogelio Dust”, the impossibly smooth and prominent wisps of auburn-brown background nebulosity that willingly paints itself on the CCD. It is seen in many astrophotos taken with an STL-11000 and processed with PixInsight – notably by Rogelio Bernal Andreo. It’s a growing trend because better CCD technology combined with better processing have improved the image signal such that almost any location in the sky will reveal background dust and nebulosity.
NGC 1333
Camera: Parsec 8300M
Scope: AP130 Gran Turismo
Mount: AP900GTO
13 x 15 min L, 5 x 15 min 2×2 each of RGB. It seems I need more exposure for this object at f/6.3 with the AP130 Gran Turismo. Sure, I could have added more subexposures, but the subexposure length itself should have been sufficient at 15 minutes. Perhaps the dark nebulae portion of this object is really faint after all.