Perseus double cluster in HST palette?

[GordonH]

Hi All

Well, I have finally taken leave of my senses, I knew it was going to happen sooner or later what with with all these sleepless nights. I know that narrowband imaging is more associated with emission nebulae, SNR, planetary nebulae and the like but I decided to do this as an experiment while I was waiting for IC 443 to come from behind my house. The moon was almost full so the sky was very bright and as I already had the emission line filters loaded in the filter wheel (LRGB set is still in the boxes), so I did 6x10 minutes unguided for each filter and combined it SII=Red Ha=Green and OIII=Blue (HST palette). Although I wouldn't recommend people spend valuable imaging time taking pictures of star clusters with NB filters I am always wanting to try new things even if they don't sometimes work, I am reasonably satisfied with the way that this has turned out although some of the colours are a bit more muted than what I have seen elsewhere. I last did this late last year with a WO 66 and Starlight Xpress M8C and this image can be seen for comparison in the star cluster section of the image gallery on my website http://www.imagingtheheavens.co.uk

Further details about the equipment used is also on my site with the image

Thanks for looking

Best wishes

Gordon

[661-pete]

Well, that's a nice pleasing image, very good quality, focus and presentation, with lots of stars there. The colours are - not quite what we're used to for a Double Cluster, but then you explain fully why that is, yourself! It makes for an interesting variant. I would merely suggest having a go at the bloat of the brightest stars, myself - maybe that's also a consequence of your filtering technique.

Thanks for posting!

[MartinB]

Very nice double cluster Gordon. As you say the NB hasn't helped the colour but then neither did the moon!

[GordonH]

Hi

I have just posted the full resolution image to my other site http://www.pbase.com/imaging_the_heavens where the colours do show up better in the full size image, be aware that it is a 14mb file and a lot of scrolling will be needed to see the full image

Best wishes

Gordon

[glennbech]

I also suspect that one of your channels are degrading the image a bit. In my very personal opinion a good star cluster image has to have as small as possible stars to resolve the core and any visual doubles. Are one of the layers more "bloaty" than the others?

Kudos for the effort