When Allan posted the Trap stars finder chart recently, that showed the faint stars H1 and H2 were only 1.6" apart, I could tell in my original effort there were definitely two stars there in my raw data but after my original processing, they just looked elongated and not clearly separated...so, now remember, I'm only working with a modest 1120mm of focal length but at an image scale of 0.84"/pix and with the excellent seeing that was at hand (1.4" - 1.7") during acquisition, I reconned I should be able to separate them
...at least that was my thinking. I was confident another shot at the data could improve things a tad. So, I whittled out some less than perfect subs, applied some decon in Astroart (not sure it really helped in this instance..?), seriously upscaled and then reworked the data a bit, adjusting contrast and (tried a few things
) to see if I could more clearly identify
all ten stars in the Trapezium finder chart, including H1 and H2...and I recon they are pretty clearly two stars now..?
and clearly different colours!
See the new close up of the Trapezium
HERE and a zoom in to see all 10 stars in the Trapezium, confirmed as separated
HERE
I see RichardJ has had a crack and done a great job
and those out there with significantly longer FL and more importantly, a finer image scale, should give it a go, you should be able to make H1 and H2 even more clear.
Anyway a bit of fun
...until 3am in the morning...
Mike
