This one was fun. Forgive us if we're tickled pink. The European Southern Observatory published
a very fine shot of Omega Centauri, which they speculate to be "possibly the very best portrait of Omega Centauri ever made."
Due to excellent seeing last night, we think we've come close. Don't bother looking at the thumbnail, it's at a JPEG compression of 2 out of 12, to fit the IIS size limit. Please have a look at the original.
Our shot is here.
Our goals were to match the ESO shot for sharpness (star size) and depth (number of extremely faint outer members), to quantitatively match the ESO shot for colour balance and saturation, and to preserve the balance between the brightness of the core and the outskirts.
The ESO shot is a slightly wider field than ours, so we've missed out on a beautiful blue star just out of field at the bottom.
Of some interest is that at a glance, the image appears close to a uniform white, but if you zoom in to actual pixels, you can see that the individual stars are quite colourful, and there are lots of "blue stragglers" about. Star by star, our star colours seem a fair match to the corresponding ESO stars.
RGB each channel 8 x 3 min subs (72 mins total). Aspen CG16M on 20" PlaneWave CDK on MI-750 fork. Field 36' arc, 0.55 sec arc/pixel. As usual, all control hardware and software, and all processing software built/written by us.