Silvia Kowollik’s Messier 42
Silvia Kowollik, one of the winners of our astronomy cameras competition sent in the following deep sky image. It was captured with the camera that she won.
Accompanying her e-mail, she added the following (translated from German):
On Tuesday evening, I was able to capture my first deep sky object using a color filter, from my balcony. The image is of the Orion Nebula (Messier 42, M42, or NGC 1976) and was captured with a DMK 21AF04.AS and Astronomik color filter. I own a small Fraunhofer refractor telescope (100/500) and have reduced the focal length to 287mm, using a Shapley lens and 5mm spacing ring. I was thus able to image the entire nebula.
I am very happy with the camera. I would never have thought that using such a short exposure time it would have been possible to get so much detailed information onto the CCD.
A great thanks go out to Silvia for this spectacular image.
Dan said,
March 12, 2008 @ 17:47
Congratulations!!!
…and I need too much time to own all that money for that camera… meanwhile, I receive a lot of scams with hundreds of tousands GBP and dollars that I won… It’s a real bad joke… maybe’s better to me to renounce at astrophotography…
Joe Dempsey said,
March 12, 2008 @ 23:55
Hi Silvia
Thats is an impressive photograph, especially for your first deep sky image.
I would like to know what kind of colour filter you used? was it just one colour?
Regards
Joe
Australia
Silvia Kowollik said,
March 13, 2008 @ 01:30
Hi Joe,
I used 3 colour filters (ccd-rgb filterset from Astronomik) in a filter-wheel.
Each colour I took 450 single pictures with 1 second exposertime, the 400 best pictures processed with “Giotto” (freeware), then contrast enhanced, moderat sharpend, saved. Same procedure for each colour, then combined to a colour-Picture.
Time capturing the pictures: 1350 seconds
Time working on the picture: 5 hours
It is not my first deep-sky picture, but the first with this camera and also the first from my balkony.
Sorry, my english is not good, so I write normaly in german. If you anderstand German, you can find a complete description of my work here:
http://silvia-kowollik.de/astro/Firewirecam/deepsky.htm
Regards
Silvia