My name is Peter Nerbun. I'm an astrophotographer who lives in
Perry Hall, Maryland in the USA.
Here are the astrophotos I captured with my C11 Schmidt Cassegrain Telescope (SCT) and ATIK 460EX astronomy camera. Please click on any one of the images to see a description of how and when I captured that particular image. After you've read the description please click on the green oval icon at the top left corner of this page, this will take you back to the page showing all of my astrophoto images.
This is one of my images of the Pillars of Creation in Messier 16 captured with a C-11 SCT on Aug 20-21 2017 and earlier.
This is my image of the Pillars of Creation inside the Eagle Nebula (M16). The pillars are giant columns of gas and dust in which new stars are being born, the largest of the pillars measures 4 light years (24 trillion miles) tall; they are located 7,000 light years from Earth. If you look at the top of the leftmost pillar in the image please note how bright it is; that's because stars were being born there 7,000 years ago due to gas being compressed into protostars under extremely high temperatures and pressures. Stars were also being born inside the column of gas but the intense ultraviolet radiation from new hot blue stars generates stellar winds (powerful streams of charged particles) that sandblast away the dust and evaporate the gas at the top of the pillar so the light from newly born stars appears brighter at the top.
I captured this image with a C-11 SCT and processed 220 minutes of 3nm bandwidth Hydrogen-alpha data including 130 minutes of data from July 31 and Aug 9 2017, 200 minutes of 3nm bandwidth Oxygen-III data from Aug 1, 8 and 15 2017, 136 minutes of luminance data from Aug 10 and 13 2017 and 90 minutes of Red data from Aug 16 2017.
For each night of imaging I recorded 75 flat frames, 75 bias frames and between 4 and 9 Dark frames (depending on the night) for the purpose of calibrating my sub-frame images; the calibration process using dark frames eliminates hot camera pixels and nearly eliminates the sky gradient caused by lights glowing in the distance. What's more dark frames fourther act to improve the overall sky contrast.
In addition to my C-11 SCT, narrowband, luminance and red filters I used a monochrome ATIK460EX main imaging camera, a Lodestar X2 guide camera, an On Axis Guider (ONAG), an F/6.3 Reducer and a Starlight Instruments motorized programmable focuser control system.