The Sagittarius Triplet

[Peter Ward]

A very lazy effort...but it shows what you can do from the 'burbs with a cool CCD

http://www.atscope.com.au/BRO/gallery60.html

[ChrisM]

Impressive! When visiting Sydney recently I was surprised how good the sky actually was.

Chris

[Paul Haese]

That is quite nice. Are you using a 4 inch focusor on your Tak? Or is this a 2.7" focusor?

I take it you only did luminence and not Ha? That is one huge field of view.

[Hagar (Doug)]

Very nice Peter. A huge field through the Tak encompassing enough to spend a while scanning. I was a bit surprised by the core of Lagoon, not your usual well resolved and unburnt core.

[Peter Ward]

Thanks guys, yes the lagoon core was rather bright, but I did say it was a lazy effort

(I've since given it a quick re-pro...)

Despite the Waxing moon....weather looks good for the weekend...a mosaic perhaps??

[TrevorW]

Lovely shot Peter plenty of detail for limited total exposure

[Peter Ward]

Originally Posted by TrevorW

Lovely shot Peter plenty of detail for limited total exposure

Thanks Trev.

I'd make the comment that very good S/N ratio's are achievable with cooled CCD sensors on bighther objects in very little time,
hence going significantly deeper can literally be a waste of time.

In this case 10 mins each channel. If I had done a luminance exposure as well, I'd doubt many punters could pick the difference over a 10 min (per channel) LRGB over say, a 20 minute RGB sequence.

Dim objects, particularly from urban areas, do however need some serious exposures. Urban imagers often have to expose for 3x-4x longer to get the same S/N as those with identical gear at a dark site.

[TrevorW]

Thanks Peter nice to know what to expect

[David Fitz-Henr]

Nice image Peter - good colour and the stars are well focused across the whole field (just a hint of elongation in the right hand corners). It must be much harder to keep the CCD exactly square with such a huge chip!

[RobF (Rob)]

Holy Mega Cow!
Amazing for 40 mins.
Won't be long and amateurs will be doing their own digital sky surveys with those sorts of FOV!

[TrevorW]

To the right of Lagoon M8, Peter has captured in this image, NGC6559, IC1274, IC 1275, IC 4685

[jjjnettie (Jeanette)]

A field that wide really put things into perspective.
It's a fabulous image for a quickie.

[multiweb (Marc)]

Great details in that huge field. Bit red to my taste but if you curve it and balance the pic you'll see a lot more contrast and blue details coming out of the starfields and edges of the nebulae. Nice work.

[Garyh]

For a quicky that very nice! Tight stars but M8 looks rather pink on my monitor?
Other than that a beauty!