Omega Centauri under busy moon

[Ryderscope]

This image was an experiment to see if I could capture reasonable data on a bright object during a busy moon period. I grabbed one hour of data on the night of 3-4 May and the remaining three hours of data on the night of 4-5 May. The moon was between 77% to 88% illuminated over the two nights. Because of the bright moon I limited to sub times to 30 seconds but took lots of them (120 x 30s per channel for LRGB).

I am pleased with the result and it is good to compare it to my previous Omega Centauri taken seven years ago. The equipment used then was a Skywatcher 4" refractor and a Canon 550D DSLR (un modified). I would have been doing manual focusing at the time as well.

Link to current image on Astrobin here. (https://astrob.in/1tevp9/0/)

Link to previous image here. (https://astrob.in/41896/C/)

As an aside it was interesting to observe the extra overhead that comes from taking multiple short exposures. With typical imaging runs of 5 to 10 minutes subs I allow an overhead of 20% to 25% extra data capture time over the actual image exposure time to allow for things like image download, re focusing etc. With this run is was close to a 100% overhead so for the fours hours of data I needed at least 8 hours of telescope time to capture the data.

[gregbradley]

That's a terrific Omega Rodney. A lot of subexposures, you put in a lot of effort on this one.

The colours look spot on.

Greg.

[h0ughy]

Happy with that result, I like it

[Ryderscope]

Thanks Greg and David. One does need to be careful not to go too crazy with the colours on this object.

[PeterSEllis]

Very nice shot Rodney, excellent resolution and colour, a good one to add too the collection.:)

Peter

[Placidus]

That's magnificent Rodney. It shows that you don't need a large instrument or even a Dark Knight to photograph a bright object. Super-pin-sharp.


And most importantly, this is one of the precious few images of Omega Centauri that gets the colour right.


Top shelf.


Mike

[codemonkey]

Lovely result Rodney!

[Ryderscope]

Peter, MnT, Lee. Thanks for your positive responses everyone. I am all keen now to capture more clusters under moonlight skies. Never let a photon go to waste I always say :D

[strongmanmike]

An excellent Omega Rodney, with lovely refractor stars and star colour :thumbsup:

Mike

[astronobob]

Grouse one, much more improved, much sharper & much deeper aswell.v

:thumbsup:

[Ryderscope]

Thanks you good sirs, glad you enjoyed it.