Fabulous image Lee, I tend to agree with Greg about the colours but otherwise it looks great, well done, enjoyed the view
.
I was up in far North QLD last week, 3hrs drive west of Cairns, under dry Bortle 1 skies with a 24" F4.2 Dob (The Milky Way cast an obvious shadow and the Gegenshein and the rarely seen faint zodical bridge were easy to see all night) and this mighty galaxy looked absolutely incredible and almost blindingly bright, the detail in the disc was like a 5min Luminance sub through say, an 8" scope?
..I looked hard but couldn't convince myself of being able to see the faint perpendicular dust streams that rise from the middle 50% of the disc, and visible in your shot, but a number of star knots and dust lanes were quite noticable as was the barred spiral like shape. The central atar in the Ring Nebula was visible without averted vision and I comfortably tracked down several 16.5mag galaxies in Aquarius using the Argo Navis and could have gone fainter but didn't have any fainter references
...needless to say, t'was an incredible 3 clear nights of viewing!!
Quote:
Originally Posted by gregbradley
I remember ages ago when I was first starting out one prominent member here (who stopped posting years ago for some reason) did a super sharp Eta Carina image on a 12.5 inch RCOS. He showed how much unsharp mask he could apply with increasingly longer exposure times. By the time he got to 16 hours he could get it really sharp. A valuable lesson.
|
I believe that would have been one Brad Moore and his remarkable keyhole image
was taken with his new 12.5 RCOS, it featured on APOD back in early 2006 I think?...and to this day is still a benchmark amateur image of the Keyhole really
he also did a deep and detailed wider field Tarantula too, over 30hrs if I recall...not a common practice back then
he had just got a new PME and I think was waiting for his RCOS so whacked a small Tak or something on it in the meantime
Mike