Welcome to the August 2008 Cloudy Nights Imaging/Sketching Contest poll!

Each month the best images selected from the individual Cloudy Nights Imaging and Sketching forums will be presented for the userbase to vote on. The monthly winner receives the coveted Cloudy Nights t-shirt! At the conclusion of the poll, the entry with the highest total will be the winner of the contest..

Please choose your favorite out of all the images. This poll will remain open through September 15th at midnight EDT.

Here are the entries for August!

Beginning Imaging's Finalist - Jerry3672:

This is M8 taken with a Canon XSi 450D unmod. single 2min sub. LXD 75 SN8 Unguided.

Film Astrophotography's Finalist - Nightfly:

Here is an image I took in May of this year atop Schoodic Head, Acadia National Park, Maine. The lights in the lower left are from the city of Machias and Cutler, approximately 60 kilometers away.

Details as follow:

May 2/3, 2008
Pentax 67 with 105mm f/2.4 lens at f/5.6
1 hour exposure on E200 film pushed +2 stops
Basic levels and color correction adjusted in Photoshop.

DSLR & Digital Camera Astro Imaging & Processing's Finalist - Kentari:

The Corona with a Diamond from Siberia

Equipment and settings:
Canon EOS 40D with EF 70-200mm f/2.8 L USM and EF 1.4x Extender at 280mm f/5.6 on a photo tripod
ISO 400
24 exposures from 1/1600s up to 1/5s at 1/3rd stop interval with some frames missing due to movement. The last and longest exposure was made when the Diamond Ring was already on its way.
Combined in Photoshop CS2 using the Pellett Method

CCD Imaging & Processing's Finalist - bill w:

FS 102 @ f/6; CS 10nm Ha, H9, SX guider @ .5 sec thru 80mm f/5 guide scope
usual bortle white skies, fair seeing (~3 arc sec hfd) better for the Ha data
30x5 min Ha
7/28,8/1/08, los alamitos, CA

calibrated, combined, light DDP, .6 gama stretch, 1% contrast enhanced, HP filter in maxim, then to PS for light DSN reduction, cropped, reduced to 60%.

Solar System Imaging's Finalist - Bart Declercq:

My submission is the area from Rupes Recta to Werner on the moon.

The image is a mosaic of images taken using a Celestron C9.25 at F/16 (FL 3800mm), using an Imaging Source DMK31 camera, operating at 30fps through an Astronomik Red filter.

The image consists of about 6 separate AVI's, each originally 2000 frames long, multi-aligned in Registax selecting the best 256 frames per alignment point, with about 20-25 alignment points per AVI.

The image was taken from Haaltert, Belgium (N 50.885°, E 4.015°) on 2008-07-24 at approximately 3h50UT. The moon was about 45° high in the sky and the seeing was decent, though not very good (hence the use of a Red filter and the relatively short FL)

Sketching Forum's Finalist - WadeVC:

...here is my submission of the King of the Planets, Jupiter

Good Luck to all our finalists!