Sweetman Astrophotography

I completed 4 nights of capture on the Horsehead and Flame Nebula. That looks like all of the minimal moon weather I’m going to get this month, so I’ll probably be moving on from this target. In total, I collected for 5 nights, but one of the nights there were clouds virtually the entire night, even though the weather forecast was “clearing within the hour” all night long. I ended up just tossing the entire night, rather than hunt through the stack for a few decent shots. There were just shy of 1500 lights at 1 minute each, for a total of about 25 hours of collection.

My main goal for collecting so long was to bring out the dark gasses as well the bright portions. I’m pretty happy with how it came out, although I will probably look into some other techniques for dealing with the high dynamic range.