A windy M109

[geoflewis]

Hi all,

Well it was a clear but windy night last night, with steady winds of 15mph gusting up to the mid 20s mph. Still you have to work with what your given and any clear skies have been a rarity the past few months. I wanted to test my new rig after performing some A-P supervised maintenance yto my AP1200 - essentially a re-mesh of the gears and a tightening of the Dec/RA assembly which had become loose. During quieter spells when the wind dropped I was please to get guiding in the 0.5' range, but there were some pretty large excursions when the gusts hit my C14-dew shield 'sail'.

I got 5.5 hours on the barred spiral galaxy M109; the first time I've ever imaged this target. The below is a quick process run using all the subs, stacked in MDL5 then processed using ImagePlus 6.5. Later I'll probably have a closer look at the data and process the L separately from the RGB to see if I can improve galaxy sharpening, reduce star bloating, increase star colour and better control the noise.

Anyway here it is, so I hope that you like it. Comments feedback, etc., are very welcome.

The above image with capture details may also be seen at my Astrobin page http://www.astrobin.com/287953/

Cheers, Geof

[geoflewis]

As I  commented, I took a longer and closer look at my M109 data, discarding some subs that had very oval stars from the effects of the wind. I then processed each channel separately, incorporating split star processing on L to brighten and sharpen the galaxy before recombining with the stars, which consequently are less bloated. RGB channels were combined, stretched and colour enhanced before blending with the sharpened luminance. Here is the result...

Regards, Geof