Hi all
Orinarily I wouldn't contemplate RGB imaging when there is a full moon but I had been shooting some Ha data for M81 and M82 and I thought "Nothing ventured nothing gained" so I gave it a try. By this time the subject was close to the meridian and an almost full moon was high in the south of the sky, the red subframes looked ok so I carried on and finished just as it was starting to get light hence the reason why there was only 14 green sub frames. The Ha was blended into the red channel. This was taken with the FSQ106ED at f5 with a Starlight Xpress SXVF H9 on a Paramount ME, autoguided by a lodestar and OAG. This was very challenging to process due to light gradients and trying to control the cores of the galaxies and although far from perfect I am quite pleased with the overall result. It is quite a while since I tried this pair of subjects together, in fact I tried them shortly after I sarted imaging and that effort can be seen at the beginning of the galaxy page in the image gallery on my website
http://www.imagingtheheavens.co.uk
The full size high resolution image can be seen at
http://www.pbase.com/imaging_the_hea...86726/original
I will have another go at this when the sky is a bit darker, but hopefully this may give people a bit of encouragement that reasonable RGB results can be obtained even with bright moonlight present
Thanks for looking
Best wishes
Gordon
)
