Stub Mandrel

I think both Skywatcher and Bresser give fair impressions of what you might see in their manuals.

Just remember good is good enough - don't chase minute errors that won't affect your viewing!

True confession, I had a 2" reflector. Managed to find the moon and either Jupiter or Mars and got very frustrated at how fast they disappeared. Saw PM on telly saying don't bother with anything less than 3", so I didn't, I just used to see if I could make out cars across the Bristol channel on Weston seafront and even use it as a 'bazooka' from time to time. Will have to see if it is still in my dad's loft...

This was my first one, M42 - surprise surprise! Just done with a bridge camera: And my first DSO with a scope - M57:

OK this is probably done in far too much of a hurry but here's my previous best M27: And here's a quick try at LRGB (combining 20 30s pictures from three nights worth, having deleted more than that number of ones with star trailing). The L layer is just a monochrome conversion of the stacked but unprocessed 48-bit RGB, the RGB is processed by splitting into the three layers and adjusting for best contrast on each one. Recombined there was a strong magenta cast, corrected by shifting colour balance towards green. Still not sure what I'm doing or how to highlight the red outer 'shell' without giving a red cast to the background. Somewhat hampered by lack of flats. Might have done better by upping yellow instead of shifting towards green, so I didn't kill the red?

I'm going to go back to some of my RAWs and give this a try.

When I split an RGB of the dumbell nebula, the G & B layers showed much better detail than the red layer, but boosting them just turned the red bits grey :-( It's hard stuff this image processing!

Here are a couple of charts that may help. Try opening them and splitting them into LAB RGB or CMYK and see how different the splits are! Desaturating them before you do the split may also help understand the role of the different channels. RGB: CMYK It's also interesting how (on my monitor at least) the CMYK (not the RGB) version seems to have the colours more as I would expect to see them.There's also a LAB - where L is lightness, A is green (-) to red (+) and B is yellow to blue, but tyeh system won't let me upload a TIFF version (you can't save a LAB jpg)(I'm only pretending to understand this, you know...)