[Omaroo (Chris Malikoff)]

Just a quick M42 I took the other night at the MAS dark sky site at Belanglo State Forest. The point of the exercise was to try and get my PEC sorted on the G11 (with Humayun's great help) using PHD. It was starting to really work, with an almost flat line in Dec and only the odd deviation of a couple of pixels in RA. Nearly there - I reckon that the mount is going to be really great when fully sorted over the next couple of sessions. I'm suffering more from star bloat than tracking inaccuracies as the ST-8 isn't an ABG-fitted model. Still OK I guess...

1 x 30-sec @-16.9C
1 x 120-sec@-16.0C
1 x 240-sec@-16.9C

A) Mean-stacked in CS3 as a Photoshop Smart Object. Slight curves applied.

B) Mean-stacked in CS3 as a Photoshop Smart Object. Shadows/highlights and curves boosted in midtones. Noise started to impinge, so gaussian blur applied to dark zones.