Quote:
Originally Posted by strongmanmike
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!!  |
Thanks Mike :-) Had noticed you'd been a bit quiet. Sounds like you had a great time. I've hardly even looked through a scope... I had a quick look at the moon with my first scope (Skywatched BD ED80) but that's about it. Posts like yours almost make me want to buy an eyepiece or two...