From: Milton Aupperle <milton@outcastsoft.com>

Date: November 1, 2010 1:31:37 PM MDT

To: Astro_IIDC@yahoogroups.com

Subject: Re: [Astro_IIDC] Re: NGC 7331 and friends..

Hi Willie;

On 1-Nov-10, at 1:10 PM, Willie Strickland wrote:

Beautiful image, Milton.  Did you align, combo and process with AstroIIDC?

Thanks..

Everything was done in Astro IIDC. Image acquisition, guiding, stacking, LRGB combine and image processing. I used "Goldberg" to scale the 3x aligned resulting LRGB tiff  image to 1x size and convert to jpeg, but that's the only other Mac software used.

I viewed that object last night here in west Texas under quite nice skies, but I didnt attempt any imaging.  Transparency was probably 8-9 of 10 and I was able to split a double with 2.8 arcsec separation quite easily.  I got sky quality meter readings in the range of 21.55-21.61.  I viewed until 3am when some clouds rolled in.

I can't see it visually here with the C8.

The faintest star I can see here is usually Mag 3.5 to 4.0 visually without the scope.

The light pollution here raises the sky background to 17,000 ADU. So the fainter edge stuff in the lower 30% of the image is lost in LP.

The Eldorado Star Party starts tonight, so last night I was just having fun and making sure everything was ready to go.  Still futzing with the firewire cables and the DMK hoping I can find a combination that works.

Well if the Camera doesn't respond properly or goes intermittently dead, then there isn't much we can do about it.

NGC7789 was my favorite of the night.  I almost attempted to image it with my Canon, but didnt want to give up the visual observing time.

Pretty cluster, but I can't see anything north of me from here. I can image M51 for maybe 1 hour tops, but it's nearly vertical and runs up against the condo, so any heat form the building makes the image unstable.

TTYL..

Milton Aupperle