As expected, seeng didn't cooperate to be able to gather more Lum this cycle. But, I did gather plenty of RGB (105, 105 120 minutes) and though the seeing wasn't good, I made it work!
As you can see, this is NOT a bland red neb.
45% full scale - screen sized
http://www.pbase.com/gailmarc/image/165743036/original
Full res for those who like to wade around and look at structure and image quality (<Cntrl-minus> and <Cntrl-plus to zoom out and in)
http://www.pbase.com/gailmarc/image/165743164/original
In the spirit of amusing but meaningless comparisons with outrageously large professional scopes
, see here for a comparison with the ESO 2.2m in Chile.
http://www.pbase.com/gailmarc/image/165743636/original
The top one is mine, the middle one is a very red version taken through the 2.2m MPG/ESO telescope at the La Silla Observatory in Chile (reduced by approx 50%) and the bottom one is the same ESO image reprocessed by Rob Gendler to bring out some of the hidden colour - he left a few halos though! The ESO image clearly has more fine detail (of course) but the processing of it seems to miss much of the other faint structure and colour
.
All up, mine's not bad for a mere 8 hours of integration (under good to very good seeing) so I've decided NOT to gather NB for it because I doubt an NB rendition could could improve much on the impact of this rendition(?) Besides good conditions here are too rare to be extravagant with integration times! I may get some more lum next cycle though.
Marcus