[Placidus (Mike and Trish)]

Sorry for the late reply, chaps. We've been plagued by a never-ending cascade of hardware and software failures - did something bad in a previous life perhaps - and have become very discouraged. No end in sight.

Originally Posted by topheart

Lovely colours!!
Beautiful!
Thanks,
Tim

Thanks for the much needed encouragement Tim.

Originally Posted by Geoff45

It is not often that pictures of open clusters impress me, but this one does. You've got a nice range of colours and it's quite a feat to have included the faint nebulosity as well.
However, the stars look a bit strange to me. A hard-edged core with a fuzzy halo looks artificial. Also, there are some dark halos around the brighter stars in the nebulosity--deringing artefacts perhaps?
Geoff

Thanks for the feedback, Geoff. When I recover sufficiently from my current miseries, I'll have a look at the star profiles. Probably something to do with how I combined the Ha and RGB.

Originally Posted by gregbradley

A great choice of object and framing. Very interesting.
My first thought though was that the colours seem off. The blue seems to have too much cyan in it and overall perhaps the image has too much green.
Colour is a hard one to comment on as monitors vary etc but your other images looked fine on this monitor.

I could be way off but that's my impression.

Greg.

Again thanks Greg. Must have another look at it, perhaps after getting some OIII and SII, should we ever get things working again.

The gear is working fine for about three hours at the moment, and then dying with an unhandled exception from the Apogee camera DLL. That's kinda unfriendly of them. Very hard to see how to proceed. Feeling seriously discouraged at present, and concentrating on building our new stockyard. At least that's looking rather fine. No colour or profile issues, and it doesn't crash at 1 am.

Best,
Mike