[Jeffkop (Jeff)]

Hi to everyone

Well the skies cleared a little last night up here and since seeing that amazing image of the Lagoon Nebula that won the APOD I have been keen to get my version of it. So here it is ... I know I could have framed it better however I was mucking about with Pempro for awhile before I got to imaging and well ... sometimes its just like that.

I cannot for the life of me produce some of the nice deep noise free images I see, I just dont get enough data in the time I have between the object clearing the house roof and then disappearing behind the trees in the back yard ... mind you they would be at a reasonably low declination by then anyway ... so my guess is that Im missing out on 1/2 as much imaging time as I could get because of the house. What Im not certain of is ... will THAT much time make the difference.

I dont know how much time people spend processing their images in photoshop, perhaps that is where you can make it all happen, if so I need lessons.

So this image is made up of 10 5 minute subs each for LRGB ... so 50mins for LRGB. That will explain a lot to most of you I know ... 200mins total.

This is first light with my new Astrodon series 2 LRGB filters. I have to say I have noticed an improvement in image quality especially in the luminance as the clear filter is near IR blocked. The over all colour seems to be deeper to. All the images stacked together with much less fuss as the blue ones seem to focus almost the same size as the red and green. I have kept an open mind about them and in my opinion they are much better than the custom scientific set I was using.

I have also included an image that I mucked about with ... I call it the Laprune Nebula.

Jeff