Stephan's Quintet LRGB 11-14 Nov 2018

[geoflewis]

I was prompted to have a try at this target by a comment from Sean (@Craney) in my recent NGC891 image thread....

The Quintet has been on my bucket list a few years, but being a late summer/early autumn target I never seem to get around to it until it's getting too late from my location, which is pretty much what happened again this year. I wanted to capture the data before the waxing Moon flooded the sky, plus with poor weather forecasts of thickening haze/mist/fog I got going very early each evening, starting the capture sequences even before the end of astro twilight. The weather forecasts were disappointingly accurate, added to which on a couple of nights I had strong winds gusting in excess of 30mph, so lots of subs were discarded immeditaely on capture;  at least my decision to shoot 5 min subs rather than my usual 10mins worked in my favour, though not much else did....!!

Here's what I managed to extract from nearly 8 hours of decidely dodgy data....

I really bullied the data and the RGB stack had some nasty vertical red & green banding, possibly due to passing cloud, which I did my best to photoshop out, so this isn't going to win any prizes, but maybe next year I can do better....

Thanks for looking.

Geof

[Craney]

Well done Geof.   There's allsorts of galactic activity going on in that image.

My attempt was best described as Stefan's Fuzzy lump.

[geoflewis]

2 minutes ago, Craney said:

Well done Geof.   There's allsorts of galactic activity going on in that image.

My attempt was best described as Stefan's Fuzzy lump.

Thanks Sean,

If you hadn't prompted me I would have missed it again this year. You were right about the C14 image scale working pretty well with this target, even with the Optec telecompressor. If the data had been better, I'd probably have cropped it for just the Quintet as well, but it looks really crap close up....?

Cheers, Geof