Fremont Peak June 3, 2006 (exploring the Milky Way in Halpha)

by Richard Crisp

The skies were pretty lousy looking leading up to sunset with a very threatening looking line of clouds building to the west running north/south. They remained in the area for some time after dark and we were getting a lot of thin stuff running above until about midnight and it finally ceased.

I was testing a new (to me) 55mm Pentax f/3.5 camera lens for a 6x7 camera on my FLI IMG6303E astrocamera. Using the combination I get an amazing 28.8 x 19.2 degree field of view, but I digress.

My initial target was the sagittarius region from M24 down to about NGC6334 in low scorpius

After two exposures of 30 minutes the lights on the transmitter towers started to invade my image so i moved next to the northern sky and shot a widefield using the same setup, but centered on IC1396 in Cepheus. This extended up to the Bubble Nebula region down to the upper parts of the NGC7000/Pelican area in Cygnus.

I managed to take three exposures of a half hour before the sun started to appear in the eastern sky.

M24 to NGC6334 widefield:

http://www.narrowbandimaging.com/Sag_widefield_55mm_6303_ha_page.htm

Bubble through IC1396 and beyond

http://www.narrowbandimaging.com/cygnus_to_cass_55mm_6303_page.htm

I realize for long time film folks this is no big deal but for a CCD guy used to smaller FOVs this is a lot of fun to shoot these widefield shots to see the larger scale structure in the Milky Way.