marco
09-05-2015, 05:51 PM
Hi all, it has passed more than 6 months since my last post in this group and since I was able to process a new image. Work and life prevented me almost any activity related to astronomy apart from keeping my observatory with running observing plans on clear nights. Furthermore, due to a crash of my home HDD I lost most of the fits and partially processed images, I had to recover the HDD of my remote observatory even if several images' fits were unfortunately lost forever. Lesson learned, I bought a back up NAS since then to avoid another painful experience like this to happen again.
So here I am, with a very popular winter target for the northern observers but not so frequently imaged in the southern hemisphere because of the low elevation it gets.
M45 The Pleiades (http://www.glitteringlights.com/Images/Open-and-Globular-clusters/i-3CJCbtP)
Full resolution image clicking on the bottom right of the page linked above
I actually never thought to imagine this one from Coona until I saw some images in this forum and one from a fellow observer that had an observatory next mine, which quality confirmed me it could worth a try. In fact all images I took had the object with a elevation between 30 and 34 degrees (the maximum height it gets on the horizon), so resolution is a bit compromised by the worse seeing due to the thicker atmosphere at low elevations.
I have tried to process out most of the details of this dusty area, so the look may not please some of you and I also had to fight a bit more than usual to correct for gradients, anyway I am very pleased with the result.
Once again the fantastic sky conditions of Coonabarabran surprises me, I would have expected to get a similar result at much northern latitudes than -31 :)
I hope you will enjoy it, I have about 80 (!) images to process so I hope to have more time to dedicate from now on and to be a bit more active in this forum that I have been in the last half year..
Clear skies
Marco
So here I am, with a very popular winter target for the northern observers but not so frequently imaged in the southern hemisphere because of the low elevation it gets.
M45 The Pleiades (http://www.glitteringlights.com/Images/Open-and-Globular-clusters/i-3CJCbtP)
Full resolution image clicking on the bottom right of the page linked above
I actually never thought to imagine this one from Coona until I saw some images in this forum and one from a fellow observer that had an observatory next mine, which quality confirmed me it could worth a try. In fact all images I took had the object with a elevation between 30 and 34 degrees (the maximum height it gets on the horizon), so resolution is a bit compromised by the worse seeing due to the thicker atmosphere at low elevations.
I have tried to process out most of the details of this dusty area, so the look may not please some of you and I also had to fight a bit more than usual to correct for gradients, anyway I am very pleased with the result.
Once again the fantastic sky conditions of Coonabarabran surprises me, I would have expected to get a similar result at much northern latitudes than -31 :)
I hope you will enjoy it, I have about 80 (!) images to process so I hope to have more time to dedicate from now on and to be a bit more active in this forum that I have been in the last half year..
Clear skies
Marco