Hi all
Got up early this morning to image the moon and decided to have a go at the trap in Orion, since it was sitting up nice and high.
The seeing was quite good, I had some local tube currents but it's the best seeing i've had in about 6 weeks. Shame the moon was only at 25° alt.
Visually, using the 7mm Pentax, the 6 mains stars (A-F) were easily visible and separated, a testament to good collimation and good seeing.
I used the DMK21AF04 and the 2x barlow. No filters were used (straight monochrome). I'll go higher resolution next time and use the 3x or 5x barlows and see how wide we can split these puppies
The first image was taken at 1/15s @ 15fps with gain quite high. 50 frames were stacked. Mild wavelets and no other processing.
The second image was taken at 1/2s exposures with gain quite high. 20 frames were stacked. Mild wavelets in registax and curves stretched in photoshop to bring out some of the fainter stars (and obviously some noise).
The G and H components are *just* visible in the second image. With a slightly longer exposure (and more accurate tracking) i'm sure they'd come out better, as I'd be able to stack more frames to reduce the noise.
You can see what my tracking is like in the 2nd image, as my DMK has a hot-pixel which danced around during stacking, which was obviously aligned on the trap.
Thanks for looking.