M11, the Wild Duck Cluster in Scutum. A compact, rich galactic cluster containing almost 3,000 stars in an area of 13 arcminutes, almost giving the appearance of a loose globular cluster. One can make out a flying V shape that that looks, to some eyes, like a flock of ducks. About 6,200 light years away.
This is the first LRGB composite I've taken with my Orion StarShoot G3 CCD camera (
http://www.telescope.com/Orion-StarS...a/p/101473.uts). I bought this to get my feet wet in mono imaging, before moving to something grander. Overall, it's a nice little low-cost unit and easy to use (and will be a fine autoguider in its later life!).
I've attached a lightly and more heavily stretched version.
This image was something done at the end of a long night spent mostly figuring out how to optimise my use of AstroTortilla plate solving and getting Metaguide up and running with my NexImage 5. So these subs were guided, albeit imperfectly because I still need to keep tweaking the settings.
Basic capture/composite details:
L: 10 x 2 min, no binning
R: 10 x 1 min, 2x2 binning
G: 10 x 1 min, 2x2 binning
B: 10 x 1 min, 2x2 binning
Astrograph was an Orion ED80T CF with TeleVue 0.8 FR/FF, on an AZ-EQ6 mount. Darks used to create a bad pixel map, flats taken with a light box. All capture + pre-proc done in Nebulosity, post-proc in StarTools. Full equipment and acquisition details on Astrobin:
http://www.astrobin.com/108932/
I plan to work some more on the processing during another cloudy night and see if I can eek out some improvements (e.g. giving it a stronger stretch - this brings out a lot more stars, but was creating some problems with the background, so needs work) -- suggestions welcome!
