[John Hothersall]

SPX350 F8.8, Mintron 12V6HC (GStar-Ex), Baader RGB, Astronomik UHC filters. 3100mm FL.

On a breezy night thought I would try the Trapezium stars and bright gas in the centre of M42 at half a sec exposure helping to cut through seeing and breeze. Short exposures with this sensitive CCD usually used as a guidecam mean no guiding. At only 8bits it is still capable at extracting decent detail.

Registax selects the sharpest images so I can remove any wind damaged or recentred star movement images from the sharpest. The UHC filter gives better detail and contrast compared to the luminance filter and has similar detail compared with the Ha filter but is much brighter.

Thought I would align a HST downsized image to compare the detail - HST image is the second one, just flick from my first one to the other (HST) for blink detail. The lower left detail around the bright star and down the red wall looks best in my image in comparison.

UHC-3000x0.5sec
RGB-500c0.5sec.

Thanks for looking, John.