December 8, 2007, 10:15pm PST
Victoria, BC, Canada

This is my first image of the Horsehead dark nebula where any detail was visible. I used my modified Canon XTi dSLR, which gave me half a chance for the first time. The bright star in this image is Alnitak, the left-most belt star in Orion.

There are dark rivers visible in this image, which is the result of using too few images and applying too much contrast stretching. I will need to take many more images of this area in order to reduce this processing artifact.

Details:
Optics: Hutech modified Canon XTi and Canon 400mm L series telephoto operating at f/5.6 mounted on an Astrotrac equatorial mount.
Exposures: 59 images at 30 sec
ISO 1600,
Custom white balance to compensate for IDAS LPS filter
Processing:
ImagesPlus 2.8: digital development of Canon Raw to FITS, dark & flat frames applied. Adaptive Addition (2.7) used for stacking the images, then aggressive Digital Development applied to the resultant image, and cropping and conversion of this image to 48 bit TIFF for further processing.
ACDSee Pro 2: noise reduction, conversion to jpg.