Conditions: taken Sep. 22, 2003 from a moonless (but light polluted sky) in Boulder, CO; no wind, no clouds, good transparency. Started imaging sequence and went to sleep since I had already spent many hours on the Helix nebula.
Setup: Borg 100ED F6.4, DF-2 focusser, CFW-8 (clear filter - IR reject), ST10XE, MaximDL/CCD, Takahashi EM-10 mount (here's how this setup looks)
Exposure time: 18x300 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 of bright parts, bloom repair, halo reduction on bright stars, clipped and reduced to 80%
Comments greatly appreciated! (mikael@leif.org)
