Elephants Trunk by Moonlight

[MarkS]

Everyone else has given Elephants Trunk a go so I thought I would.  But the moon was as bright as a searchlight last night - I could even read by it.  So I used a CLS filter to cut it back slightly.

20x5min - modified EOS 350D on Celestron C11 at F6.3
Annoyingly I can't find any flats on my laptop so I'll process this properly when I get home.  It would also frame better with the camera turned through 180deg.

John,  your modified webcam worked a treat for guiding - the last few frames of this shoot were my best guided ever!  I discovered the PhD graph where it plots the oscillation index.  As soon as I played with agressiveness and hysteresis to raise this index from 0.1 to 0.2 my stars became round.

[JohnP]

Looks very promising - Should be great when you reprocess - you certainly need flats - I didn't realize the vignetting was quite so severe with your setup. Glad the webcam works..

John

[RobertM]

Looking very good Mark.  Plenty of detail in there and the flats should make a massive difference though I think you're really pushing that reducer/corrector to the limit.  I'm looking forward to seeing the finished image.

btw. I didn't see any clear sky last night - what planet were you on ?

[MarkS]

I didn't see any clear sky last night - what planet were you on ?

Posted from France ...