First piece of the puzzle

Couple weeks ago I was searching internet for new subjects to photograph in the night sky. Ive tried to find one are that has alot of large nebulas in tight group for a panorama. I ended up with constellation of Auriga. Last night the clouds cleared for couple of hours so I managed to get some data to play with. It isnt as good as I would like it to be, because my Sigma 120-300mm f/2.8 suffers from missaligned elements and stars on the left side are out of focus. I probably have to shoot this again with 105mm macro wich has terrific image quality from corner to corner compared to 120-300.

The downside is that with such a short focal lenght there is not of pixels for zooming in the good thing is that I can get consistently 2minutes with 300mm lens. With 105mm it would be 6 minute subs and no tracking errors if everything is normal!
I would like to complete this with my 300mm but just isnt an option until I get it repaired, if its even repairable... :(
Anyways, here is first try. I probably need around 8 images with 105mm macro to complete my panorama. Might add this are as a separate image to it aswell.

Largest and brightest red nebula on the upper right is IC405, below that is IC410 on the far left surrounded by IC417 is star cluster M38. With just one hour of data I am suprised how well the extremely faint dark nebulas appeared on the upper right corner.

Heart and Soul of the universe

Couple nights ago despite the lunar glare I tried to capture my first light of the Heart and Soul nebulae. Expecially Soul nebula is very faint and I couldnt see them in the unprocessed images at all, after stacking 25x2min exposures I could see some faint detail on the far right where the brighter parts of  Heart nebula is.

In post-processing I worked on to bring out more detail, after adjusting white balance and curves I tried new tecnique to bring out more detail. In the Lightroom color tab pulled red and orange saturation and lightness up and blue saturation down about 50%. That worked very well!

Heart and Soul nebulae
Canon EOS 6D | Sigma 120-300mm f/2.8 | Astrotrac
25x2min | f/2.8 | ISO 800

I see red

Hydrogen is most abundant material in the universe, astrophotographers often see red nebulas in their images. Expecially emission nebulas are often red or magenta. The color is caused by Hydrogen-alpha: a specific deep-red spectral line of 656.28 nm.
Constellation of Cyqnus has alot material to photograph. Large and bright emission nebulas like North-America nebula are easy targets even for unmodified cameras. You can get a good looking image with just 30 second exposure time, however the more you gather light the better your images turn out. The California nebula in the constellation of Perseus is also worth a try.

The California nebula glows red because of hydrogen and a really hot star near by called Menkib. It has gotten its name from it shape that resembles the state of California.

The California nebula