February 9, 2021: 81 minutes on the Rosette

[michael.h.f.wilkinson]

Last night the skies cleared sufficiently for me to set up the APM 80 mm F/6 with Tele-Vue TRF-2008 0.8x reducer, and my modded Canon EOS 550D on my EQ3-2 mount. There was some haze in the sky reflecting city lights, so I included my Optolong L-eXtreme filter in the optical path. I managed to get 81 60s subs, before clouds cut the proceedings short. A quick stack in APP, using its gradient removal (hardly needed) and automatic stretch yielded this:

Combining this with 60 minutes worth of data from January 30 and some subtle tweaks in Gimp yields this:

Some of the fainter outlying bits are starting to come through. Hopefully I can add some more later this week

[peter shah]

beautiful detail