New Direction in Imaging - Sharpless Catalog

If anyone were to look at astrophotography on Facebook, flickr, Instagram, etc, there is a glut of all the famous and simpler objects. Everyone including me has done M81/M82, M51, and the list goes on.

I guess I want to walk a different path. Not for the publicity but for the adventure of doing something a little different. So I've chosen to pursue the Sharpless catalog of emission nebula as the base for what I'll go after. Sky and Telescope magazine had a really good article by Ron Beecher on the "Treasures of the Sharpless Catalog." It allows me to do two things I've wanted to do for a while:

1. Be a bit different than the mainstream
2. Do Mosaics

I'll be needing to do quite a few mosaics to get some of the larger Ha regions of our galaxy like the North American/Pelican nebula. One of the first objects from this catalog I'll be going for will require a 4 panel mosiac as shown below.

So, like Bilbo Baggins, I'm going on an adventure!