M81 and M82 under a full moon

[GordonH]

Hi all

Ordinarily I wouldn't contemplate RGB imaging when there is a full moon but I had been shooting some Ha data for M81 and M82 and I thought "Nothing ventured nothing gained" so I gave it a try. By this time the subject was close to the meridian and an almost full moon was high in the south of the sky, the red subframes looked ok so I carried on and finished just as it was starting to get light hence the reason why there was only 14 green sub frames. The Ha was blended into the red channel. This was taken with the FSQ106ED at f5 with a Starlight Xpress SXVF H9 on a Paramount ME, autoguided by a lodestar and OAG. This was very challenging to process due to light gradients and trying to control the cores of the galaxies and although far from perfect I am quite pleased with the overall result. It is quite a while since I tried this pair of subjects together, in fact I tried them shortly after I sarted imaging and that effort can be seen at the beginning of the galaxy page in the image gallery on my website Imaging The Heavens - Home Page

The full size high resolution image can be seen at M81 and M82 photo - Gordon Haynes photos at pbase.com

I will have another go at this when the sky is a bit darker, but hopefully this may give people a bit of encouragement that reasonable RGB results can be obtained even with bright moonlight present

Thanks for looking

Best wishes

Gordon

[adamsp123]

Nice one Gordon considering the moon phase.

[Coco]

very nice indeed Gordon, the core of M82 is especially impressive

[old_eyes]

Super image Gordon under the circs.

I tried the same trick with my ED80 and Canon 1000D, but nowhere near such good results. I managed to get 50 mins of data in 5min subs before it clouded over, but the results are pretty poor. I can see M81 and M82 but not much detail.

How long did you collect data for?

old_eyes

[old_eyes]

Super image Gordon under the circs.

I tried the same trick with my ED80 and Canon 1000D, but nowhere near such good results. I managed to get 50 mins of data in 5min subs before it clouded over, but the results are pretty poor. I can see M81 and M82 but not much detail.

How long did you collect data for?

old_eyes

Apologies Gordon - you gave full details on your excellent website - and yes you ahd a lot more data than I did so I don't feel too bad

old_eyes