Trifid nebula - that was fun!

[nytecam]

The last clear night I tried for M20 the Trifid Nebula low down in Sagittarius I made a hash of it as it set into my neighbour's bushes.  Last night's effort had to be planned with military precision.  In the afternoon I worked out at the scope that I had a "20 minute window" from 8.45PM in dusk to 9.05 PM from exiting my neighbours willow to diving into another neighbour's grape vine with the main scope. 

The piggybacked 11cm Newt had a longer opportunity as it is raised higher and clear of the vine - here for starters is the result from the latter which I'm very pleased with in the circumstances capturing both red emission and blue reflection nebulosity- data on image.  Used the SX Lodestar-C [not Cx2] and SX s/ware for capture and stacking.

[rwilkey]

Great capture - congratulations!

[RobertI]

Well done on getting such a low object - you don't see this imaged very often from the UK. Amazing colours  -  really nice capture.

[nytecam]

Thanks Robin and Robert - yes Robert I've tamed the colour in this earlier image through the tiny sky gap referred to with main scope [30cm f/3.7 SCT+SX Lodestar-Cx2+SX s/ware] for better resolution - fov too small for the upper blue reflection nebula so perhaps dual scopes have benefits

[HiloDon]

I just came across a great little app called AstroAid. It was only $2.99 US. You can put in any scope, camera and optical aid and it will give you an image showing FOV for any object. The data base appears to be very large. I put in Nytecam's setup and saw the image scale he got for M20. Tried to post the image here, but it doesn't look like there's an export function. It looks like it's a great tool to determine what setup to use if you're trying to Image a particular object. I run it on my iPad.

[nytecam]

Thanks Don - I'll check it out !

[nytecam]

I used the moon as my initial goto in twilight for my later dusk shots of the Trifid Neb - here a three-pane montage plus nearby Mars and Saturn to the same scale in 1ms exposures throughout

[RobertI]

Great idea putting Mars and Saturn alongside!