Hi All,
Well, another school night of clear skies in Sydney last night, who'd have thunk it? So I decided to lug out the scope again and try for some more photons.
The seeing was pretty good but the transparency wasn't as I think there was a lot of water vapour causing some awful sludge reflected off the Lights Of Sydney to the east where this object was rising.
In the end and by the alignment of my trusty polar scope, I ground out 24 x 5 min subs over 2 hours worth, of which, only 2 had to be thrown away because of some neighbourly lights deciding to be turned on in the middle of them.
So, here is 1 hour and 50 mins of the Helix, a VERY faint object on the screen even after 300 sec exposures and one I have spent most of the day and most of my hair trying to clean up to look somewhat reasonable.
I would have liked some more details in the core section, but am happy to get it close to what I think is OK for a relatively large data set. I sure miss Lostock's pristine skies compared to Sludgetown where I live.
This is slightly cropped on the edges to remove some stacking artefacts and was taken with the ATIK 314L+ on the 8" HEQ5 Pro using a CLS filter.
Processed in DSS, Startools, Nebulosity and Photoshop CS3 in the kitchen sink.
Comments and feedback are welcome. Uncompressed 4.6Mb PNG file
here
Cheers
Chris
