Spent some time with the star tracker last night, targeting the star Rigel, and along with it, the Witches’ Head Nebula. Rigel is the very bright star on the bottom right of Orion, which is appearing right now in our southern sky, just after sunset.
The Nebula is pretty dim, so I wasn’t expecting much. After running my collection of 11 images through a quick HDR merge in Photomatix Pro, the initial results pretty much reinforced my expectations. Along with the obvious limitations of trying to capture the very faint photons of light reflecting off a celestial cloud of gas 1000 light years from earth, and despite my best efforts, my focus was just a very little bit off, compounding any distortions that my trusty old Nikkor zoom lens was causing.
It wasn’t until I sent the same stack of images through Sequitar, though, that things started to be interesting. A quick look at the 16 bit tiff file that the program produced, the Witches Head could be seen, a faint smear alongside Rigel. I then adjusted the RGB curves in darktable, and again ran it through Photomatix Pro for the final jpg file.
While certainly not a great image (or even a good one, really…) I’m pretty happy that I was able to capture the very, very faint image of the Witches Head.
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