IC410

A faint, dusty rose of the northern sky, emission nebula IC 410 lies about 12,000 light-years away in the constellation Auriga. The cloud of glowing hydrogen gas is over 100 light-years across, sculpted by stellar winds and radiation from embedded open star cluster NGC 1893. Formed in the interstellar cloud a mere 4 million years ago, bright cluster stars are seen just below the prominent dark dust cloud near picture center.

SW254N / EQ-g / Canon 350d (mod) / 21exp 4mins / pre processed in Nebulosity 3, post processed in StarTools V1.2. 

The Leo Trio

I was finally able to capture the Leo Trio last night. I used Startools v1.2 to do the post processing and Nebulosity 3 for the pre processing. I'm very happy with the results. 20 exposures, 2 minutes each. SW254N, Atlas EQ6g. Canon 350d (modified) guided.

(from Wikipedia:)
The Leo Triplet (also known as the M66 Group) is a small group of galaxies about 35 million light-years away^[5] in the constellation Leo. This galaxy group consists of the spiral galaxies M65, the M66, and the NGC 3628.

StarTools v1.2

I've been playing with a new image post-processing program that I was introduced to on AstronomyForum.net. It's called StarTools http://startools.org/drupal/ and so far I have found it to be a great, fast to learn and very powerful image processing program. Since it has been raining here most of this week, I have gone back and played with a few of my images just to give it a test drive. (M20 Trifid Nebula)