Beehive Cluster - How?

[gnomus]

I'm trying to get a few hours on the Beehive tonight.  So far the sky is playing ball.  I am set up for 1 hour each of RGB as a start.  If I manage any more time tonight, should I simply add to my RG & B or should I shoot some Lum?  I've never tried a cluster before, so apologies for the stupid question.

[ollypenrice]

I see no point in Lum for bright clusters, on the face of it. Why do we shoot lum? To save time. The tedious old OSC versus LRGB argument raises its head. L captures all colours at once and so catches three times the colour filtered signal. (When I measure it, it looks more like four times but hey-ho). And L will, perhaps, bloat your stars and burn out the colour from their cores. A pure starfeild is best, in my opinion, in RGB only. But there's a 'but.'  Suppose there is some nice dusty stuff in the background sky. A pure RGB may fail to find it but an L may do so. And don't forget how many times Fabian Neyer has found faint but structured Ha signal behind clusters which we were happy to regard as stars against dark sky until he woke us all up! 

Olly

[gnomus]

Thanks Olly.  I'll keep going with the RGB then.  I ain't no Fabian Neyer!!!  Maybe next year.....    For anyone who hasn't seen Fabian's pictures - http://www.starpointing.com/ccd.html 

[Hawksmoor]

On 15/02/2016 at 22:08, gnomus said:

Thanks Olly.  I'll keep going with the RGB then.  I ain't no Fabian Neyer!!!  Maybe next year.....    For anyone who hasn't seen Fabian's pictures - http://www.starpointing.com/ccd.html 

Thanks for the link, I hadn't seen Fabian' s pictures, have now!  Wow!!  Cheers, George.