M17 Omega + something strange??

[rocco57au]

I was out the other night taking some images in the hope of learning of how to properly use a CCD camera and later hopefully process something good with the data I had captured. M17 seemed the most interesting target and so I took a series of 24 images of various duration.
I then found some time to try and process what I had captured and played around with a trial version of CCD Stack. In the "learning" process of stacking the images I came across the "Blink" tool and was impressed to see what may have been some very distant satellites move across the area of sky I was imaging... however... something caught my eye and I quickly scrolled back some images to be somewhat baffled by what I had seen...

I've attached an image of the single capture as well as a screen shot of my desktop to magnify the image without pixellating it too much... does anyone have any idea what this might be :eyepop:

[cometcatcher]

If you look closely you can also see them in the brightest of the other stars. It's just artifacts I'm afraid.

[LightningNZ]

Yeah, you get that when one image is much brighter than another and the blinking removes the core from the star, leaving a ring. Still pretty cool stuff.

[rocco57au]

Thanks for the feedback guys... and here I was jumping for joy thinking I had discovered something of the "unknown"... lol
am still a bit puzzled by the shape :)

[Rex]

Hey Rocky, I think it's pretty cool mate. It might be the Decepticons coming to take over earth. Like you said it's a weird shaped artifact, but then I guess, artifacts are random discrepancies in the data, so can be any shape. I still think it's the Decepticons :rofl:
Great shot by the way.

[rocco57au]

Yeah thanks Rex!... Now looking forward to collating all the data I've captured and making something decent of it... in my case, easier said than done :P