Frog Rock Observatory

DEEP-SKY IMAGES

All these images were taken with a GSTAR-EX CCD video camera .
Most were through a 31.5 cm f/4.5 Newtonian reflector, but from January 2011, a 31 cm f/5 mirror is used .
Black and white images use the camera unfiltered.
Colour images are created by exposing through red, green and blue coloured GSTAR filters combined with
an IR block filter (unless otherwise noted).
The image magnification of the camera is roughly equal to a 7mm eyepiece, so much detail is revealed.

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31.5 cm f/4.5 and 20 cm f/4 Newtonian reflectors on a Parks equatorial mount,
housed in a wheat silo observatory.

The targets are recorded as full resolution, uncompressed AVI files directly to a PC hard drive using
either Winfast PVR (bundled with capture card) or GSTAR-Capture (freeware from MyAstroShop ).
Registax software is used to stack each frame from the avi recording and remove dark frames.
Photoshop CS2 is used to carry out a variety of image processing techniques such as
histogram stretching, gradient removal, noise reduction, layer unsharp masking, combining RGB filtered
images or blending old colour prints. Blending old and new .

Below are a few select images from the several hundred objects I've imaged since May 2006. * Click thumbnails to view full image *

Clusters

Messier 6		NGC 4755		NGC 2362
	NGC 6520 + B 86
Messier 4		NGC 104		NGC 5139
	NGC 6752		NGC 6441 - nicest GC
UKS 1 - faintest GC				AM 1 - farthest GC



		Big Globulars compared

Nebulae

Messier 1		Messier 8		Messier 20
	Barnard 33		Barnard 72
CG 1		CG 4		CG 30, 31
	Cederblad 90		IC 2220
NGC 2070 in LMC		NGC 2261		NGC 6729
	RCW 38		RCW 40
sn 1987A		Eta Carina and Homunculus		the Thumbprint