Hello!

This is my first submission to my Astrobin Gallery. It is a composition of part of the Carina Nebula, the Gabriela Mistral Nebula and the Gem Cluster. Ever since acquiring my Evostar 80ED I've wanted to do wide field compositions like this, especially with a faster F/number than what I'm use to. I started out with a Skymax-127 which, at F11.8, was not the greatest at larger bright targets such as these. I am really happy with how it turned out, unfortunately the unmodified DSLR does show it's short-comings in parts of the image, there could be significantly more signal in the Ha nearby the Gem Cluster that I've seen in other work.

This is probably one of my favourite regions of the night sky. Carina (NGC 3372) comes very close to matching the level of satisfaction given effort to image as M 42 in my opinion. I had only imaged Gabriela once before (terribly) so I wanted to do it justice, and I'd never photographed the Gem Cluster. I imaged over two nights after finding the amount of dust that was at was too noisy to bring out from the first night. Imaging a second night really helped bring more details to the darker parts of the region, as well as cleaning up the faint (to my camera) Ha regions, especially near the Gem Cluster. The colours that arose mostly come from the stacking of the data in Sirilic, which seems to have dominating blues in the core of NGC 3372 with my setup. There are tens of thousands of stars within the long exposure subs, so the stars present here only come from the short exposures. Within the image itself you can dive in and observe a myriad of HII regions (obviously), intricate features in the Carina and Gabriela nebulae, reflection and dark nebulae, as well as several open clusters.

Apart from criticism on my choice of a less than optimal camera, I'd be very happy to receive constructive criticism given the software I currently use. I am aware of the elongated stars near the edges of the screen, likely a combination of sensor tilt, backfocus, and the camera rotation. I am also happy to hear about any recommendations when it comes to future acquisitions based on the current equipment list above when it comes to shooting similar targets. I'm always looking to learn to improve my images to as wide an audience as possible.