Some Deep Sky Images From Dark Sky Site Cherry Springs

Took another trip to Cherry Springs, which is about 4-5 hours away.  This site is so dark that I cannot yet image deep enough to see light in the background of my subs.  I'm going to have to do longer exposures to try to get the faintest of faint light to show up on the camera.  Such a cool site to image.  The Milky way in the summer looks like a noisy wide field image with the naked eye!  This is by far my favorite imaging and viewing location.

Here are a couple of images that I took there.



This is the Trifid Nebula, M20 in Sagittarius.  This was done with only 5 - 3 minute exposures at iso 1600.


The next was M101.  This rather deep image consists of 8 - 5 minute exposures at iso 1600....  All of the images were taken with the Orion 8" f/4.9 scope.



Following M101, I decided to go over to the Veil Nebula.  I have trouble getting decent shots from home, so I thought I'd do my best to get a few of the parts of it from Cherry Springs.  Did pretty well with these.  The first is the Network Nebula portion.  16 exposures over 2 days.  All are 5 minute exposures at iso 1600.  You will see an odd thing with the stars.  The stars in the center are tiny, and get a little larger the farther from the center you go.  This is a problem with imaging with a short Newtonian.  A coma corrector will fix that, and will be buying one as soon as I get back home.



Last but not least, here is the "Witches Broom" portion of the Veil, NGC6960.  18 - 5 min exposures, iso 1600.  It intresting to note, the highest iso I can use from home at 5 minutes is iso 400, which makes the camera 4 times more sensitive, and the background brightness is much darker in the higher sensitivity images.

Cherry Springs State Park

Armed with a new telescope, I ventured out to Cherry Springs to get a few images.  I concentrated only on big objects.  This is the ideal location to get large faint objects because with the exceptionally dark skies, the background gradients are almost nonexistent.

I was totally happy with my NGC7000 image from the last post, so I didnt bother imaging that one again.  I did want to get the Heart and Soul, which I was unable to do before this.  Also wanted to get the Veil Nebula, to see how much of it I could get in one frame.

I warmed up with the Andromeda Galaxy before starting on the dim stuff.

Since Andromeda came out so well, I then went over to Cassiopeia and got the Heart.  These emission nebulae are difficult to do in white light, but its so dark at Cherry Springs, that one does not really need any filters to do a decent job with them. 

After the heart, I moved the scope a couple degrees over to the Soul Nebula.  This one was a little brighter and required less image processing.  I was able to image them both and they both fit in the frames.

Couldnt quite get the entire veil nebula complex in one frame, but I was able to get the witches broom and Pickering's Triangle.