Electric Richard and LDN1222

How's that for a "trippy" header?

So, I went back to Atoka last Thursday and Friday night. My ol' pal Richard Allen got some much deserved time off work and expressed interest in wandering around in the dark, so he was my astro buddy on this trip.

We had the place to ourselves on Thursday and the skies were great. I was hunting for LDN 1222 -- a small Dark Nebula near Cassiopeia. It is a little "off the beaten path" and a bit of a challenge to find. But it was the "Challenge of the Month" on the Cloudy Nights forum, so I took up the gauntlet and gave it a shot.

This is my wide field image of the area around LDN 1222. The actual target is that small dark patch hugging the upper center border. I was not totally sure I got the right target until checking this image against my charts later the next day.

I composed for the larger Emission Nebula in the lower left, and those cool tiny Dark Nebula "squiggles" in the center of frame.

This is a really interesting area, but very hard for me to process (it took all day in front of Photoshop to pull out the data). While clear, the skies were very humid and hazy and it gave me some light pollution vignettes that corrupted my colors -- took a bunch of time to balance things out (time to invest in some filters). Plus, I had no images to use as reference. I just had to "wing it". But I think I got close to a good "naked eye" version of this area.

LDN 1222 was exposed with 17 x 10 min subs (just under 3 hours of data).

Later that same night, I managed to get a good shot of the Pleiades.

So, that was Thursday night. On Friday we were joined by my pal Max (and briefly by Terry, also from the club). Friday night I shot M33.

Up next: Images of the Pleiades and M33... stay tuned!