[bratislav (Bratislav)]

Hi,
as Davind Malin awards drew close last night (my congratulations to all winners, awesome display of astrophotography mastery), and my efforts went all but completely unnoticed, I decided to release two images that I submitted (plus two more).
Those are all northern objects, still visible from Australia, but usually categorized as "too hard" basket because of dispersion, extinction and in general way too little time high enough for a decent exposure.
In my case I have spent two years in Europe where I got involved with testing and installation of a real beast - 1.4m professional Ritchey-Chretien telescope. During acceptance/first light testing we had a few clear nights to test the scope, and also to do some 'nice' (that is non-scientific) astrophotography (but with limited time of course. No megadata, sorry).
Now, pro setup offers many advantages, but few challenges as well. Back illuminated E2V chips are state of the art as far as quantum efficiency goes, but offer truly horrible darks as well as flats. Crystal structure of the substrate and polishing of the back of the chip leave many odd structures which all compound to simply weird looking background. And not everything is easy to substract in software (not to me at least). As this is alt-az-derotator mount, flats taken and lights are all angled to each other, and I simply had no answers. To make things worse, filter set professionals use (UBVRI Johnson-Cousins) have next-to-impossible-to-balance-afterwards inbuilt "feature" that made it extremely difficult work later to get anywhere near 'true' or at least "nice" colors.
But enough winging, here's (appropriately butchered by IIS jpeg limits) images of M27 (Dumbbel), M51 (Whirlpool), M64 (Black Eye) and M57 (Ring nebula closeup). I encourage to compare those with anything resolution wise (except of course Hubble). I mean anything - ESO, Keck, Gemini, etc.

Bratislav

PS not all images were submitted to DMA, just M27 and M51