“The swan, like the soul of the poet, By the dull world is ill understood.”
Heinrich,Early Poems–Evening Songs (no. 2)

Astrophotography isn’t really something I have done a lot of.I’ve tried a few other times without much success,by my standard.This is even more different than what I’m used to attempting.I have tried taking images of the sky as a whole, but taking a picture of a nebula through (attached to) a telescope gives you a whole lotta zoom,the telescope effectively becomes (in this case) a 750mm zoom :D Having a magnification of 28.Sure beats my cheapy 300mm zoom by leaps and bounds! The full view is much more satisfying than the thumbnail ;)

This pretty little (try 800 solar masses on for size) nebula sits in the constellation of Saggitarius.It is also known as the Omega/Checkmark/Lobster/Horseshoe Nebula and as M17/NGC 6618.That’s a lot of a.k.a’s !

The swan stuck out to me the most :D This swans’ a swimmin’ in the lovely galaxy we call home,the Milky Way ♥ The golden star to it’s left is also quite pretty,but it only has a catalogue-type name (HR 6858) and I feel it should have a catchier name than that.I choose The Swan’s Scribe ^^ There,much more distinctive :) This nebula is also next door to the Eagle Nebula.

Under the guidance of +Mike Rectorand with fantastic amounts of his help I was able to capture this awesomeness.He found it for me after all ^^ , so I must share credit with him :).I thought it’d be neat to throw my camera oh his telescope after his battery died :- Just to see what happened.Why not,right ? So,he found this pretty swan for me and I ended up with 30 exposures,20 dark frames and 19 bias frames.These were all taken piggybacking off his Omni XLT 150 at 1/30 sec & Iso 800.I would have no idea what a “dark frame” was if it wasn’t for him and they help out the the oodles of noise I’d be getting with the exposures alone.The frames were stack in Deep Sky Stacker and taken to ps for a little touch up.

Swan Nebula a.k.a Omega,Checkmark ,Lobster,Horseshoe Nebula and M17

7 Responses

  1. You did an excellent job with this. Hope I can convince you to do more in the future… welcome to space, we have room for you up here :)

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