Set-up and alignment went smoothly and I was able to image five objects, as follows: 1) The Whirlpool Galaxy (M51), 2) The Eagle Nebula (M16), 3) The Triffid Nebula (M20), 4) The Pinwheel Galaxy (M33) and 5) The Andromeda Galaxy (M31). I've imaged all of these before except M20, which I think has become one of my favorites. The others I chose primarily because I wanted to show Ed some of the nicer ones available... though I wanted to return to the Eagle Nebula to get a better image of the structures in the middle of it, which I found are the "Pillars of Creation" that the Hubble Space Telescope has made famous. My last color image of these did not show good detail of these features (though that was largely a function of the seeing that night and my limited image processing skills... because I have seen good color images of them by amateurs).
I tried to set up my auto-guiding camera, but when it came time to focus it I was unable to find any guide stars (or any stars at all for that matter). I'm hoping this isn't a hardware issue. I need to set up the scope in the backyard before I go to OSP and test this after aligning the guide-scope to the imaging scope; that way I'll know for a fact that there are good guide stars in the field-of-view (FOV)and will spend more time trying to achieve focus. As a result, I spent the evening as I did at Trout Lake, taking exposures of one minute or less... something I probably would have ended up doing anyway because of the wind.
Image-processing on the monochrome images came out very nice. I took no color data on M16, M51 or M31. Those images are the first shown below. The image of M51 is one of the best I've taken and is good enough data that it will be worth adding to later. The M16 data shows the pillars (star forming regions) very distinctly... just wish I could get higher magnification!! M31 needs more data to do it justice, but does show the dark dust lanes. I plan to go back to this one at OSP and use a focal-reducer that will give me a wider FOV. I'll take more data hoping to be able to show close to the full size of this object (which is actually much bigger than the full moon!).
Image processing of M20 was completed as an LRGB, but I'm a bit disappointed in the results. I had a problem on this one and M33 with extra "stars" showing up that were pure-color (red, blue or green) and therefore looked unnatural. They seemed to be someone systematic but around only a portion of the stars. It looked almost like misalignment, but couldn't have been because of the fact that not all stars showed it. I need to keep working on this because it is a major limiter. I've done color images before and haven't seen this, so I'm hoping it was another result of the wind or something unique to my setup that evening. M33 is a beautiful, large galaxy. I'll try to gather more data on it at OSP.
It was great having Ed along tonight... not only as company, but also because he helped me out in a couple of situations where I was being stupid (like... where did that darn tube extender go?...Ed-"Is that it on the camera?"). He loved getting away to a place where the Milky Way was visible and enjoyed seeing the images and how they were created.
M51 - The Whirlpool Galaxy
M16 - The Eagle Nebula, including the "Pillars of Creation", star-forming regions that the Hubble has awed people with.
M31 - The Andromeda Galaxy
M20 - The Triffid Nebula
M33 - In monochrome because I couldn't make the LRGB work... too many artifacts that I've so far been unable to understand and eliminate. This one was processed with DeepSkyStacker tools before Photoshop (instead of CCDSoft).
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