It pays to refocus Part II

[kinetic (Steve)]

Second attempt last night. Above average seeing.
Focus was better and didn't change all night noticeably.
But there's always something conspiring against me
High cirrus cloud drifted in and got worse close to midnight.

I got frame 3 done just as Eta Car was totally closed out.
I think because of the cloud, I had to do slight brightness
adjustments to merge the images. (on Jan 18 version I did not
have to).

The Fickle Finger feature turned out well also, thanks Mike S. for
the tip

Also attached is part of Humunculus maybe showing with a slightly
different curve applied to Eta C.

Steve

[Hagar (Doug)]

Nice Steve. Starting to come together very nicely. When do we get colour.

[atalas]

Great high res detail Steve!

[strongmanmike (Michael)]

Well done Steve.

Using the best of lots of really short exposures is the only real way to get the best resolution on such a bright deep sky object, rather like planetary imaging.

Eddie Trimarchi, being typically way ahead of everyone else did an excellent example of the Keyhole area (one of the best ever IMO!) some year ago now with his lill'ol C11 using this technique, he used very long focal length too:

http://astroshed.com/st10pics/eta.jpg

Pretty amazing huh? Look at the homunculus (sp?) arount Eta

Mike