Telescope Reviews: May08 CN Imaging/Sketching Contest poll!

Welcome to the May 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 June 15th at midnight EDT.

Here are the entries for May!

Beginning Imaging's Finalist - X-Lurker:

Lunar Mosaic

SVP 5" Mak
900NC
Registax4
QCfocus
WcCtrl
PSE 2.0
12500 web cam frames stacked
Captured 5/09/08 10PM CDT
Seeing 3/5
Trans. 4/5
NW Arkansas

Larry Edwards

Film Astrophotography's Finalist - RALF_T:

M3

It´s a composite of two images. A Kodak TP hyp. (at 65 minutes) was combined with a Fuji SHG 200 (at 45 minutes).

It was shot at the beginning of May this year with my 12"/5.3 homemade Newtonian.

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

Comet 17P Holmes with Melotte 20 - 11th/12th November 2007
Details:

This is a HDR 3 frame overlapped mosaic consisting of:

9 x 60 secs at ISO 800 (coma)
9 x 120 secs at ISO 800 (coma)
23 (coma) + 22 (tail) + 33 (coma and tail) x 360 secs at ISO 800 (3 overlapping frame groups). All unguided.

Televue 85/0.8 Focal Reducer/Losmandy GM-8/Canon 10D

Method:

Calibrated with master dark frames and master flat frame and stacked with Deep Sky Stacker
Digital Development in Images Plus
Gradient removal with GradientXterminator
Final stretching and colour enhancement in Photoshop.
Mosaicing manually preformed by applying a -1.04 pincushion correction to each mosaic frame with the Photoshops lens distortion filter.
HDR manually performed in Photoshop using standard gaussian blurred masking techniques
Final noise reduction performed with Neat Image.

This image really sums up the great preformance of this wonderfull comet. We can see it approaching the bright stars of the wide open cluster Melotte 20. The coma displays a bright white dust cloud surrounded by a now rapidly dimming gas coma, glowing faintly green. The faint blue ion tail had visibly detached from the coma 3 to 4 days earlier and can now be seen masqerading as a false reflection nebula within Melotte 20.

CCD Imaging & Processing's Finalist - dsnope:

Here is Rho Ophiuchi Nebula IC4604, IC4603, clusters M4 and NGC6144 next to supergiant star Antares.

Date: 5/11/2008
Loc: Anza, CA
Optic: Canon 300mm F/4 at F/4
Camera: STL11000
Exposure: LRGB 80/35/35/35

Solar System Imaging's Finalist - rumples riot:

Jupiter and Io

Scope C14 with Peltier cooling
Camera Skynyx 2-0
Astronomiks filters
12650mm FL
3 x 40 second avi's with frame stacking of 800 frames per colour.
Registax4, Astra Image and Photoshop CS

Sketching Forum's Finalist - Sol Robbins:

April 9, 2008
Scanned Pencil Sketch of Jupiter.
6" Skywatcher Refractor,
Chromacor II,
Burgess Optical Nebula Filter,
5mm BO/TMB Planetary Eyepiece @ 224x.

Good Luck to all our finalists!

Which Image is our winner?
Users may choose only one (42 total votes)

Beginning Imaging's Finalist - X-Lurker:

1 02%

Film Astrophotography's Finalist - RALF_T:

1 02%

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

11 26%

CCD Imaging & Processing's Finalist - dsnope:

11 26%

Solar System Imaging's Finalist - rumples riot:

10 23%

Sketching Forum's Finalist - Sol Robbins:

8 19%

--------------------
"He's dead, Jim - I'll get his wallet, you get his tricorder." - Leonard "Bones" McCoy

Weston CSC: