Telescope Reviews: July's Imaging/Sketching Finals are on!

Hello Folks!

The July 2009 CN Imaging/Sketching Contest Poll is now open!

The winning sketch or image in this contest will be posted to the front page of the Cloudy Nights Website for the whole world to see and admire. More importantly, your vote could help the winner score the highly coveted Cloudy Nights T-Shirt!

You may ask - how good are these guys? Well, see for yourself - here is the list of this month's finalists with their work:

Beginning Imaging's Finalist - Domerman:

M16 - Eagle Nebula imaged on 7/18/09 from PA skies.

10 x 5min Subs
QHY8 w/IDAS LPS Filter
Orion 80ED mounted on CG-5GT
Auto-guided with AT66ED and Meade DSI
Preprocessed in Nebulosity
Processed in CS4

Film Astrophotography's Finalist - Rick Thurmond:

Category: Film
Photographer: Rick Thurmond
Object: NGC6995, part of the Veil Nebula
Equipment: C14, Giant Easy Guider, AP1200, STV Autoguider. I built the camera from a Graflex 4x5 camera back.
Dates: July 17, 22, 23 2009, starting about 10 pm each night.
Film: Three exposures on hypered Tech Pan using IDAS red, green, and blue filters
Location: Cobb, California
Processing: I hypered the film, exposed the three images, scanned the images, combined them in my Mac with a program I wrote. I adjusted the curves, cleaned up and cropped the image.

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

Antares and Rho Ophiuchi region.

June 21 and 22 '2009
At Crimean_Astrophysical_Observatory, during "Southern Nights 2009" amateur astronomers festival.

33x5min @ ISO800, unfiltered

Canon 350Da(baader filter mod),
Nikkor ED 180/2.8 (@ 2.8) lens with Nikon->EOS adapter
EQ6Pro SynScan equatorial mount.
Auto-guiding (TAL-75R 75mm refractor plus QHY6CCD)
Iris for calibration & stacking, and Photoshop for post-processing.

CCD Imaging & Processing's Finalist - Ozy:

Exposure
- Ha - 20x15-minute sub exposures
- OIII - 20x15-minute sub exposures
- 10 hours total exposure

Equipment Used
- Takahashi FSQ-106ED
- SBIG STL-11000M
- Paramount ME
- Astrodon 5nm Ha
- Astrodon 3nm OIII

Registered and stacked in CCDStack
Processed in PixInsight
RGB Combine in Photoshop CS4

Solar System Imaging & Processing's Finalist - bill w:

In honor of the impending "mars will be larger than the full moon" emails, here's a collage of the morning planets from 7/18/09 (Jupiter, Neptune, Uranus, Mars, Venus in order of appearance) superimposed on the moon, all at the same scale.
8" LX200ACF at 2268 mm, IDAS LPR filter, SX H9C
7/18/09, los alamitos, CA

calibrated, combined, color balance and plane re-alignment, RL deconvolution in maxim. then to PS for crop and assembly.

Sketching's Finalist - kraterkid:

Here's my entry for July 2009.

So don't delay! Visit the July 2009 CN Imaging/Sketching Contest Poll and vote for the best of the best!

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

Weston CSC: