Conditions: taken Sep. 18, 2003 from a moon-lit (and light polluted) sky in Boulder, CO; no wind, no clouds, medium/poor transparency.
Setup: Borg 100ED F6.4, DF-2 focusser, CFW-8 (H-alpha filter 656/3 nm), ST10XE, MaximDL/CCD, Takahashi EM-10 mount (here's how this setup looks)
Exposure time: 12x600 sec
Processing (Mira6, Mira7, Photoshop7): dark subtracted, flat fielded, masked hot/cold pixels, registered, sigma-reject combined, curves and levels in Photoshop, grain surgery noise reduction, unsharp masking, clipped and resized x0.85. Click here for a heavily processed version showing the faint outer shells.
Here's a color image incorporating this data.
Comments greatly appreciated! (mikael@leif.org)
