My first attempt at LRGB

[lensman57]

Hi,

This is the first time that I managed to use my manual filter wheel, my old Atik 16IC  and a set of OpticStar UV/IR, High Transmission RGB filter set that I bought in the begining of the summer and were not used as yet. I had decided that if the weather held up, it did, I should go for a bright nebula of the right size, M27,  to manage a decent pixel scale, not to be so, with my Ascension 80mm APO @ F4.8 and the pisel sixe of the Atik I could only manage 3.97 arcsec/pixel which is far from ideal. I also knew that I had to work fast because M27 very quicky dissapears behind some very tall trees of my neighbour. In all it meant that I could only manage 150s subs for RGB and for the LUM I used my  35nm Ha filter rather than the usual IR filter. I took 13 R, 11G and 11 B and 11 Ha. I also found out that the filters are near enough parfocal which is a good thing as the adjusments were minimal. I used DSS for stacking and a very long winded PS session to align the stacked subs and register them to each other with considerable cropping . I had the M27 on one side to try and capture as much as the starfield as possible but it did not work out I am afraid  so apologies for the bad framing. The LRGB combine and processing were done in StarTools and finished off in PS. I had hoped to capture the outer halo of M27 which is almost impossible with even an OSC  CCD but I think that there is just a hint of this visible as the 150s  subs are very short.. Personally I quite like the star colours, much better than I had managed before with my OSC CCD.

All advice and comments are greatly appreciated and thanks for looking.

Regards,

A.G