Well...part of a chicken anyway.
Surprisingly good weather last night (and tonight) in Newcastle. I've complained about it in the past, I know, but last night was just about perfect - no moon, no wind, no cloud and good seeing all night. The AP, FLI ProLine CCD and NJP mount all worked bloody flawlesly too
I decided on the Lambda Centaurus "running chicken" nebula near the southern cross becasue while I had done an Halpha image of it a couple of years ago I had never imaged it in colour and the FOV with my camera then (SXV-H9) was pretty small too.
Simple LRGB processing was used in Astroart4 for the HaRGB and surprisingly little Photoshop was necessary and no noise reduction was used at all either. Because I was imaging in the direction of the Newcastle light dome I did the R,G & B when the object was near the meridian to reduce the gradients and it worked - I didn't have to do any gradient removal on this image luckily. I usually save the highest points for the Ha and Lum for maximum detail but I hate gradients - a good comprimise and becasue of the good seeing there is still plenty of detail revealed
We are about to move to a beautiful new home in Newcastle.... in the middle of heavy light pollution and with no sky access (ie not able to use the scope) sooo this may be the last image from me for a while..?
Hope you like it?
Full frame colour image (1.9 meg):
http://www.pbase.com/strongmanmike20...51806/original
Close up of the nebula details in Halpha (1meg):
http://www.pbase.com/strongmanmike20...52388/original
Cheers and see ya all (well at least some of you) at SPSP in a month.
Mike