This image was an experiment to see if I could capture reasonable data on a bright object during a busy moon period. I grabbed one hour of data on the night of 3-4 May and the remaining three hours of data on the night of 4-5 May. The moon was between 77% to 88% illuminated over the two nights. Because of the bright moon I limited to sub times to 30 seconds but took lots of them (120 x 30s per channel for LRGB).
I am pleased with the result and it is good to compare it to my previous Omega Centauri taken seven years ago. The equipment used then was a Skywatcher 4" refractor and a Canon 550D DSLR (un modified). I would have been doing manual focusing at the time as well.
Link to current image on Astrobin here.
Link to previous image here.
As an aside it was interesting to observe the extra overhead that comes from taking multiple short exposures. With typical imaging runs of 5 to 10 minutes subs I allow an overhead of 20% to 25% extra data capture time over the actual image exposure time to allow for things like image download, re focusing etc. With this run is was close to a 100% overhead so for the fours hours of data I needed at least 8 hours of telescope time to capture the data.
