Coma Cluster

[silentrunning]

FInally a clear night and no work in the morning.  :)) 

After seeing Sara's awesome M101 I decided that that would be the target for the night. However, whilst checking things out and waiting for twilight to end I zoomed in on M3 to check focus etc, on the way up from M3 towards M101 I had a quick single frame grab of some other objects including potential targets M94,M51, M63 all looking really tempting then I saw this massive clump of galaxies in Stellarium and wandered over to grab a frame. Well I ended up staying on the Coma cluster for 4 hours which meant doing a meridian flip which is always interesting in my little potting shed obsy.

I had to chuck away the first 4 images as the sky was still to bright so this is 12x900s (3 hours) in L only. 

I always like a b/w image of clusters...

and here's a fully plate solved version...

 

Here's a full resolution version...

[laudropb]

Lovely capture and presentation.

[silentrunning]

I managed to get a little color data (5x5m each of RGB) to add to this image