M8, six nights, four hours...

So here we have the results of six nights worth of shooting, sorting, stacking, etc. As I have mentioned before, DSLRs aren't terribly good at picking up the deep reds associated with emission nebulae, in part because those wavelengths aren't very easily visible to our eyes. But use enough exposure time and it starts to become apparent.this is a stack of over 400 30 second exposures, plus the hundreds of reference frames that were shot along with it (to make no mention of the nearly 1000 shots taken that were unusable due to periodic wobble.)

I've put a lot of time into this one, but hey; once you have a really good polar alignment, you hate to move the equipment, you know? Plus, M8 is our summer Orion. As many great things as there are in the summer sky, M8 is the only object that can compete with the Great Orion Nebula for spectacle.

Tonight looks like clouds, but once it's clear I'll be shooting the new supernova in M101. That was also one of the first galaxies I photographed this year, so I am looking forward to seeing if there is any obvious improvement in my skills...

Oh, and to make sure that Google feels the pain, this has been uploaded at 2000 pixels-be sure to click on the pic to see the large version!