Introduction
One of my favourite views in the sky; the colourful wide field view of Antares. I love the fact that you can see so many different types of objects in one field of view; the red emission nebula, the blue reflection nebula, the globular cluster next to Antares and the dark dust lanes and especially the three dark dust lanes connecting it visually to the milky way.
Unfortunately it doesn’t come high enough above the horizon to photograph where I live, so I was very happy to shoot this image when I had the chance during my holiday on La Palma. While switching from imaging with the telescope to using a lens I didn’t pay attention to the aperture setting on my Nikon D7000. After the first night of imaging Antares I noticed the aperture was set to F7.1, doh! I like to stop down the lens a bit, but to F7.1 is a bit much and perhaps a waste of time. For the sake of consistency and to keep the diaphragm spikes I decided to keep the setting to F7.1 when imaging the second night.
Subject information
Antares (α Scorpii, α Sco, Alpha Scorpii) is a red supergiant star located in the constellation of Scorpio and it is visible just outside of the ‘white band’ of the Milky Way. In this field of view we can see dark dust lanes, reflection nebula, an emission nebula and the globular cluster NGC6144.
Image acquisition details
Date: 02/05/14 & 03/05/14
Location: La Palma
Optics: Nikkor 80-200mm f/2.8 ED lens used at 80mm F7.1
Mount: NEQ6 on fixed pier
Camera: Unmodified Nikon D7000 used at ISO800
Guiding: No guiding
Exposure: 33 x 480sec.
Processing
Processed in PixInsight
