This shows the south eastern quadrant of IC1396 a nebula in Cepheus. Inside this nebula are famous and not-so-famous dark nebulas. B367 is near the top center, while B163 is the duck-like dark nebula in the lower right. Numerous other dark nebulas can be seen too, but their contrast is not as high as I expected ... I'll redo this in H-alpha next year to see if there is any hope. The focus of the pre-meridian flipped images was slightly off, and this left me very unhappy. Then, the ambient temperature changed significantly halfway through the session, so I had to change the temperature setpoint of the CCD. This in turn required that I shoot extra dark frames at that new temperature. This complicated processing, but I think I got it right in the end. Overall, I'm not 100% happy with this image, but it is desktop background worthy.
Technical details: Date: Aug 12, 2015 Time: 10:30 pm - 3:00 am Camera: SBIG STF-8300M CCD Temperature: -10 C, -7 C Optics: Televue 127is (native) Filter: Astronomik L Light frames: 30x8 min Dark frames: 50 (-10 C), 25 (-7 C) Flat frames: 25 Flat darks: 25 Binning: 1x1 Guiding: Orion SSAG @ Orion finder (~162 mm) Mount: AP Mach 1 Dithering: Manual Processing: Stacking and deconvolution in CCDStack, Curves and Levels in PSCS6.
Other notes: A busy night. Upon setting up all my gear I noticed that there were two field mice not far from my setup. They must have called their buddies because by 11pm, I was surrounded by four mice - two were chasing each other in the South, one was checking out my car in the North-East, and another was getting dangerously close to my tripod in the West. I spent quite a bit of time chasing them away, but it had no significant effect. Eventually, I did an angry gorilla impression (lots of jumping, sounds) right in front of their hole in the ground ... only to have these guys return within 5 minutes. Even 'marking my territory' did nothing. If these guys can get away with such gutsy moves and survive on the mountain, perhaps I don't have that many things to worry about when I am up there. I gave up trying to chase them away, and just made sure they would stay out of my car. The sky was illuminated by a great meteor shower. Lots of bright ones, many of them in pairs some even in triplets and lots of them leaving trails for a few seconds ... really good stuff.
