From: Alan Friedman <alan@greatarrow.com>

Date: May 31, 2012 9:33:24 PM MDT

To: Astro_IIDC@yahoogroups.com

Subject: Re: [Astro_IIDC] M51 LRGB


nicely done Milton!


cheers,

Alan


On May 31, 2012, at 10:47 PM, milton_aupperle wrote:

Hi Folks;

Despite a nearly 3/4 full moon, I managed to re-image M51 last night. I started at 12:45 am for the RGB then the Luma once the moon set. By 3:15 am, the twilight was too bright to continue imaging for 16 minute exposures.

Unfortunately the torrential rains of the past few days softened the sandy soil under my tripod legs and it must have shifted. So my 16 minute luma frames are soft and have bad field rotation.

The shorter duration 2x2 binned RGB frames don't have very much rotation, so I combined my luma stack from May 25th session with the RGB color from May 30th.

To make things even more fun, I had rotated the camera 90° to capture more of M51 on May 30, so I had to do a lot of rotational fiddling to get it all aligned in the Astro IIDC LRGB import..

Still it turned out pretty good:

http://groups.yahoo.com/group/Astro_IIDC/files/DSO/M51_20120526L_0530RGB_MJA.jpg

No darks or flats applied at all.

TTYL..

Milton Aupperle