Ha Imaging of the Crescent and Eastern Veil Nebulas

I have only tried Ha imaging once, and I was immediately discouraged by out-of-focus stars, long exposures, and complete absence of the DSOs I was trying to image. However, an individual on a Yahoo Group I frequent tried it with the same imager I have, and his results were really good.

I decided to give it another try. I fired up the Mallincam DSm, equipped it with the 7nm Ha filter and mounted it on the 8 inch f/4 astrograph. I found that the Ha focus was a lot different from the white light focus--and the exposure was much longer--around 3x the white light integration. The images here are stacks of around 15 images captured with 30-second integrations. I'm pleased with them as they show much more detail than the white light images of the same objects.

The Crescent Nebula in Hydrogen Alpha Light

Detail on the Crescent Nebula really popped compared to the white light image (below); the nebula is faintly visible, compared to the delicate structures revealed in Ha.

The next target was the Eastern Veil, which is much too extensive for most imaging systems to capture in a single exposure, so this image is just a part of it. I have never been able to image the Veil in white light, so I was very pleased by even this rather faint, smoky, ephemeral image.