After a very long hiatus I have finally gotten back in the saddle
I got a new camera, and this is a single 4 minute exposure with a simple slight curves stretch- I have 30 of these that I will be stacking together. This is shot through a hydrogen alpha filter, picking up ionized hydrogen gas. I'm not going to get into too much detail but basically hydrogen is the most abundant element in the universe, and due to the radiation caused by the surrounding stars (the main source is in the middle where the twisty thing is), it causes the electrons in the nearby hydrogen atoms to move up an energy level. When the electrons fall back down, it releases this energy in the form of red light. The reason you can't see any color in this image is because it was taken with a monochrome camera (better for signal). I also took 30 4 minute exposures through an oxygen III filter, which obviously picks up ionized oxygen gas- it glows blue. Because hydrogen is much more abundant, the images taken through the hydrogen alpha filter looks more interesting. I am going to take all of these images and process the Ha and Oiii versions separately, then I will assign them color channels in photoshop to create a full color image. The reason why the stars look wonky towards the edges is because I haven't really figured out the correct backspacing for this setup yet, and I'm only using about 2 hours of data so this is sort of just like a test run. Anyways here it is:
