Conditions: aquired in Barraba, a small town in New South Wales, Australia; no moon, passing haze and clouds, the target was fairly low in the sky (alt=27 deg)
Setup: SBIG STL11000M camera, 100mm Nikkon objective, piggybacking in a large mount with several telescopes.
Exposure time: 1x2 mosaic consisting of L: 7x200 sec and 4x10 sec (1x1 binning); R,G,B: 3x180 sec (2x2 binning)
Processing (Mira, MaximDL, Registar, Photoshop): dark subtracted, flat fielded, de-bloomed, registered, median/avr combined, DDP, color balanced, combined as LLRGB, repaired de-blooming artifacts using short exposure frames, cropped and reduced 50% for web format
This famous showpiece of the Southern sky was a prime target for my astro-imaging expedition to Australia. The duration and number
of exposures was kept at an absolute minimum, since time was scarce. There are many bright stars in this field, resulting in alot of
blooming on the original images. These were repaired using Wodaski's de-bloomer, however when the bloom is extensive it cannot be repaired
completely. I therefore also took a series of very short exposures (10 sec.) which were used to fix these de-blooming artifacts.
Here's my main page where you can see more of the pictures I have taken so far.
Comments greatly appreciated! (mikael@leif.org)