Date/Time: August 28, 2011 12:56AM PDT

Location: Island Star Party, Bright Angel Park, Duncan, BC, Canada

This is my first attempt at photographing dark nebulae. By all accounts, this Barnard's object is one of the easiest to image, which I can verify since there are two obvious dark nebulae visible with no special processing on my part and only 35 minutes' of exposure time. Darker and more obscure Barnard's dark nebulae await my skills to improve.

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: 35 x 1 minute at ISO 1600

Conditions: Temperature 16°C, Humidity 100% (dew). LVM 5.5, Transparency 4/5, Steadiness 5/5, clear skies

Processing:

ImagesPlus 4.25a x64 - Auto-process dSLR - Bayer at capture white balance; digital development from raw, dark frame calibration, normalize, grading, alignment, average min/max exclude combine. Aggressive contrast stretch (BP 1968, Bkgd 77); colour balance, crop & save as 48 bit TIF.

ACDSee Pro 4: reduce colour depth to 24 bit, save as jpg