[Maurice]

Hi All

Spent some quality astro time over the weekend at Phil Harts place (thanks Phil) to try some deep sky 'lucky' imaging (sort of).

Attached is very much a 'proof of concept' 1st attempt.
Fighting both the clouds, average seeing and an un-collimated Vixen VC200L meant that I only ended up with about 45min worth of unguided 3sec exposures with a ZWO 224MC camera. Of that only 30min worth was used to assemble the attached RGB image.

The VC was working at 1250mm FL with its reducer. Sampling with the 224 was about 0.6"/pixel

I tried to balance the background colour variation, but even IRIS struggled with doing a decent job (damn the high cloud!). DDP was the filter of choice for bringing out object details.

The method of reducing the bit depth to 8bit and increasing the gain, thereby reducing read noise and using heaps of frames, seems to show some promise. The whole imaging experience becomes quite trivial with no guiding & no filters to worry about.

This might only work on the brighter objects, but I can imagine that multiple hours of integration would go some way to revealing faint structures in DSO's.

Anyway, its a work in progress...

cheers
Maurice

PS The compressed version here seems to have lost a number of the smaller stars...