Date/Time: July 6, 2010 11:38PM PDT

Location: Cattle Point, Victoria, BC, Canada

This Open Cluster of young stars in the constellation Serpens. This photo also features a diffuse emission nebula, or H II region (IC 4703), which is a region of active star formation. The tower of gas that can be seen coming off the nebula was made famous by a photo produced from the Hubble Telescope and dubbed "The Pillars of Creation". These "pillars" of gas and dust are approximately 100 trillion km (4 light-days) high.

Equipment: Hutech-modified Canon T2i dSLR utilizing an IDAS UIBAR-III filter mounted prime focus on a Borg 101ED f/4 Astrograph mounted on an unguided HEQ5.

Exposure: 64 x 30 seconds at ISO 1600

Conditions: Temperature 17°C, Humidity 47% (no dew). LVM 4.0, Transparency 3/5, Steadiness 4/5, clear skies

Processing:

Canon Digital Photo Pro - digital develop RAW to 48 bit uncompressed TIFF

ImagesPlus 3.82 x64:
1. Auto dSLR Process/Color at Capture WB - calibrate lights with darks; Normalize; Grade; Align; Combine (Excluded Min/Max Average). 54 out of 64 frames used in final stack.
2. Richardson-Lucy 7x7 20 iterations; Saturation

Adobe Photoshop Elements 9
1. Flatten TIF image from 48 bits to 16 bits
2. Annotate image
3. Resize image smaller