Leo Triplet colour Canon 350D on Tak Esilon 180ED

[MarkS]

Leo Triplet from last night (Sat 17 April) at Kelling Heath - (title in the Subject line, apologies to Space Dog!)

27 * 5min at ISO 800 modified Canon EOS 350D on Tak Epsilon 180ED (500mm focal length at F2.8 ) + Baader IR/UV filter
10 darks and 30 flats also used.

This is an unscaled crop of the image:


Guiding with the QHY5 on the recently slackened EQ6 was the best I've ever seen.

Mark

[Fay]

Gosh, Mark, that is really good, great colours , nice framing & good stars. I really like the lower left galaxy

[Rocket Pooch]

Thats nice, heres my attempt, I need to do it on a monitor not the laptop http://farm3.static.flickr.com/2727/4534450595_29a74ee554_o.jpg

[JohnP]

Excellent Mark - that is looking very good - loads of core detail in all three galaxies & great colours. Nice to get RGB showing in the diffraction spikes as well..

John

[RobertM]

That looks lovely Mark.  Being picky, I think you could possibly sharpen it a tad to bring out more detail.

Robert

[MarkS]

Thats nice, heres my attempt, I need to do it on a monitor not the laptop http://farm3.static.flickr.com/2727/4534450595_29a74ee554_o.jpg

A very interesting comparison.  Yours is a dedicated camera on a slowish scope.  Mine is a DSLR on a very fast scope.  What was your total exposure in each channel?  Mine was 27 x 5min i.e. 135 minutes in total

Being picky, I think you could possibly sharpen it a tad to bring out more detail.

Interesting you should say that - I've already sharpened this as much as I dare.  I'm beginning to wonder if the DSLR's Bayer matrix might ultimately be a limiting factor when it comes to sharpness because to convert the RAW image to RGB, an awful lot of interpolation (i.e. data smearing) is taking place which doesn't happen with a dedicated astro-CCD.

I need to design an experiment to test this.

Mark

[Rocket Pooch]

100L 30 RGB total 190 min...