NGC7331 and friends from Extremadura.

[Whistlin Bob]

A friend at my astro club has set up a syndicate hiring time on a pier in Spain (with www.roboscopes.com) and this is proving a welcome respite from the lack of UK imaging opportunities. This is my first selection of target- something that has often defeated me both visually and in getting any sort of decent image from my back garden as they drift through the light pollution of Burton to the south of me. Rather wonderful then, to process a decent length of data from a dark site. Almost feels like cheating!!!

The data was acquired with a Williams Optics 132 with an ASI1600, and has 3 hours of luminance, and 1 hour of red and blue. We ran out of time on the green, so that's only 15 minutes, which made the colour balance a bit tricky to achieve. The thing that really blew me away with this data was the dust that was present. I just can't get it from home. I've tried hard to bring it out and also gone easy on the saturation as the colour data is a bit limited in the green channel. I've also tried to be gentle with the stars to try and get the bewildering numbers of galaxies to stand out. I've also attached the starless version of the luminance channel as I really liked the image of just dust and galaxies.

I hope you like it- feedback welcomed  

 

[old_eyes]

Nice image of a difficult target. I also use Roboscopes (piers 1,5 & 14). It does give you great dats to work on.