NGC2070 - Tarantula Nebula

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NGC2070 - Tarantula Nebula

[Public Domain] 4 May 2005 Dylan O'Donnell
CATEGORY : Video
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I’ve been doing some pretty nerdy stuff lately. Out of interest, and to subdue my immediate urge to spend lots of money on my own telescope I have leased telescope time from the SkyLive project which has 6 telescopes, 4 in Italy and 2 in NSW, Australia. This allows me to remotely control the Celestron 14″ scope at Grove Creek Observatory and take multiple exposures on their CCD camera. It’s not great resolution but the scopes focal length is pretty amazing. Since the CCD is monochrome, you need to take several long exposures with a number of different filters. This is all really new to me but I thought it would be a good way to practice the science of astrophotography before spending any good money on inevitably inferior setup.

So this image is simply made up of 3 stacked images, each with an RGB filter respectively. Each exposure is roughly 60 seconds to catch the nice glow of the nebula’s gas, however you can see that the central cluster of stars is really bright.

Also dear readers, I have decided to reorganize my photos based on this new subject matter and now have a dedicated ASTROPHOTOGRAPHY gallery and another just for WEATHER (Clouds, Lightning etc).

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