[Bolts_Tweed (Mark)]

I've wanted to image the loops for years (it was beyond my old 4 inch and 350D) and Mr Wards recent posting inspired me to try.

I had the push the exposures with the 5 inch which necessitated a lot of em to reduce the noise down to where it is now - could be more but unfortunately I am not indepently wealthy and work gets in the way of my hobby.

This is mapped as Ha (420), SII (60), Ha (60), OIII (60) all binned 1x1 - exposure subs ranged from 30 seconds to 10 minutes (0.5, 1, 2, 5, 8, 10 min) to allow manually reduced the overexposed sections - Im not too happy with the manual HDR processing - might have to get more short exposure data and EasyHDR or similar.

Anyway this is the first process - hope it looks ok - again i am on the observatory computer - I used several of your grayscale cards to calibrate but I still dont know if it is right - particularly wrt colour.

Astrophysics EDT130, SBIG ST8300M, Astronomik 6 nm filters

Stacked in Maxim Dl, then CS2 and some MLDB and selective smoothing especially aroung the foreground cloud edge (thx Mr Crawford) - ps I like the colour subtle - this was done deliberately and I know others dont but what the heck - smile - It'd be boring if we all produced the same images
Mark Bolton