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A difficulty that may not be apparent is the fact that these images can take a long time to acquire and sometimes just as long or even longer to process.
So in any given month it may not be possible for someone to actually complete a given image due to weather happening on the right days and personal committments etc
Most people are using data that they have aquired over long periods and adding to it as the seeing and their gear and spare time permits, and also as their processing skills develop, so this leads to a bit of a problem in terms of the competition -
- a. does a comp require that the data be acquired in that month or even that year ?
- b. is it fair to use 25 hours of data acquired last year compared to someone who has never imaged that particular target before and can only acquire say 5 hours of data ?
- c. if a. doesnt apply, how are you going to get someone who has already spent the time and effort acquiring the data to effectively discard it and reimage it (life is too short to waste valuable astro imaging time)
If a. does apply it could be quite difficult for 2 hours of LRGB to adequately compete with 15 hours of LHaRGB !
The other thing is most people tend to have their own projects happening and so they are following their own plans and ideas for trying new techniques and developing their skills based on their own progression.
People have differing gear - some have wide field instruments and others have narrow field, which may or may not suit some subjects.
I am not saying it won't work, but I think these things and others I havent thought about, need to be considered carefully otherwise the pool of entrants would dwindle to low numbers - a competition is not not a competition if there is only one or two entrants per classification.
The other thing is that this makes it a Southern Hemisphere only comp as our latitiude's targets are not visible in the Northern Hemisphere and visa versa.
Then you may have to consider all the other things that the Malin Awards have considered or been accused of not considering !
There are some threads on this forum that raise some of the concerns.
Just some thoughts.
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