Stephan's: 12.5 hours RGB at 3366mm

[ptc]

taken during August and September from the ranch in the Sierra foothills

total of 150 x 5 minutes: 30 60 60 (r g b)

used Stinger 450mm f/12.6 classical cassegrain at 3366mm (f/7.3). ML4022 camera: 0.42"/pixel image scale

http://www.narrowbandimaging.com/stephan_mk1sn2_f73_ml4022_rgb_page. htm

wind was a problem: sorted through lots of images to find a few that were decent to make the image
:(

[noswonky]

I would expect something like this from Hubble!

[multiweb]

Great colors Richard. Considering the wind conditions. Amazing you got anything really. :thumbsup:

[strongmanmike]

Looks great Rich, that's a lovely grouping, you do very well considering the long FL :thumbsup:

We have a nice little grouping reminicent of this group in Pavo:

http://www.pbase.com/strongmanmike2002/image/101280698/original

Mike

[gregbradley]

Nice shot Richard. There's some interesting tidal streams in some of those galaxies.

Any gold in those hills?

Californian Sierra hills area is very similar to my NSW dark site observatory in terrain.
So are parts of Texas.

Greg.

[ptc]

cool group

to me the groups are far more interesting than single galaxies. just beginning to explore galaxy imaging too... been doing narrowband nebulae forever...

[ptc]

five acres of our property are a 1870s era gold mine... sure made a mess of the land: but in the spring it has a lot of wildflowers growing on it

the entire area near where our ranch is was a major gold mining region. People still pan for and find gold too. I've seen estimates that only 20% was mined, but there are very stringent regs now preventing the sort of mining that was done in the Gold Rush days

if you pan around here

http://tinyurl.com/3xk89t9

you will see what appears to be plowing but in fact are tailings from the placer mining of the Merced river running between them. They dredged up the river bottom and sifted through the material and dumped it along the side of the river where it has been for 150 years. that area is a 20 minute drive from our ranch

[SkyViking]

Stunning image with great detail and colours. It looks very natural which is nice. Congratulations on taking such a good image.
Is it a crop from a larger frame?

[ptc]

Rolf,

thanks for the comment. It is not a crop from a larger field. Just the normal cropping of the edges from dithering and alignment of the various frames

the sensor is a 2k x 2k resolution

[John Hothersall]

Great to see this galaxy group imaged at long FL, this is my favorite gal group with all those gravitaional waves caught really well.

John.

[ptc]

I may add some luminance to the image too.... stay tuned John