Lagoon Nebula!!!

Hey all.

The attatched image is one that I took back in August at the Land of Oz Observatory in La Cygne, Kansas. It is M8 and is a composition of two 30 minute exposures, and one 15 minute exposure on Kodak E200 film. The images were taken through an 8" LX200GPS working at f-6.3. All guiding was done manually through a piggy-backed Stellarvue Nighthawk and a barlow lens in front of the diagonal (so it was working at an effective FL of 1440mm). The three images were registered and stcked using Registar, and the final processing was done using Adobe Photoshop 7.0. This is one of the nicest images I have produced. Its too bad though that it takes so long to process. Its hard for me to find the time to spend to do it correctly. Being a college student, time is a limited commodity, as many of you probably know. Hope you all enjoy. Comments and suggestions would be appreciated.

Clear Skies,
Taylor Chonis

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Beautiful shot Taylor! Nice sharp pinpoint stars and good information on the nebula as well. I will look forward to seeing more of your work.

Mike Vollmer

Taylor, fantastic image!!! Can you tell me what you are using to attach the Nighthawk to your LX200, and what type of guiding ep/manual techique (guide rate, polar alignment) you are using? Thanks.
Mike

Hi Taylor,

That's really pretty. I took the liberty
of bringing up the nebulosity a bit. You've
got quite a lot recorded. Nice image!

Todd

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