Hi all
Ok, so it isn't the owl and the pussycat but I couldn't resist a play on words. I have never tried M97 before and as a planetary nebula I knew it would be ok for narrowband imaging. Given the sky conditions last night it was ideally placed, ie high up near the zenith. Originally I was only planning Ha and OIII as I had looked on other sites and not many people had used SII (perhaps because there was virtually none). I hadn't planned on getting M 108 but when composing the image saw that it was in the same shot so I got 2 for the price of 1. I had originally planned on 12x10 minutes unguided for each filter which is what I shot but during the session there must have been some patches of icy moisture in the atmosphere as a few subframes were ruined for each filter. At the end of the session I still had about an hour left till day light so I shot one SII frame and saw that there was something coming through although much fainter than Ha and OIII so I left it running and got 4 useable subframes. This is the end result with 8x10 minutes for Ha, 7x10 minutes for OIII and 4x10 minutes for SII combined as SII:Ha:OIII = R:G:B with a weighting of 3:3:1. Taken with the Takahashi BRC-250 and H36. There are two close up cropped images of the galaxy and nebula themselves on my website
http://www.imagingtheheavens.co.uk which show these objects in greater detail
Thanks for looking
Best wishes
Gordon
http://www.imagingtheheavens.co.uk/USERIMAGES/Owl.jpg
