RGB: 8x8' each channel
Total: 192 minutes

This was my very first "RGB only" image (no luminance), and what better target to experiment with that than this one - definitely one of my favorite areas in the sky. It has it all!! Well, almost!

Although I'm happy with the results, I'm not convinced RGB is really a "time-saver" from doing LRGB. In order to acquire perfect luminance from the RGBs, one should have a balanced amount of R, G and B exposures, and to get a better SNR, you still need as many subs as possible. Which means that since you're shooting RGBs, you need to get triple the number of subs. Of course time is not usually a big concern for people with permanent observatories, but for those of us who need to travel, setup, teardwn, etc. I still think it's better to get an ok amount of RGBs, then get as many luminance images as possible.  I might change my mind later on, but for now I'll probably stick to get LRGBs.

L: 12x5', RGB: 4x5' each channel
Total: 2 hours

On Saturday April 24th, since I had to wait over 3 hours for Rho Op. to show up,to "kill" time I captured some data from M104 (Sombrero Galaxy) and later some from M63 (not shown in this entry)with the FSQ 1.6x extender. What you see up there is a rotated crop at the original image size.

It was the first time I was using the extender and I only ranone V-curve with FocusMax, so the focusing wasn't great. In addition to that, in the middleof the session a really gusty wind started to blow for over 1 hour. Guiding became a bitjumpy at that time, but surprisingly all subs were usable.

800mm FL - which is what I get with the extender, plus f/8 focal ratio - is not the best focal length forthis object, but I cannot use my C9.25 until I get a new focuser for it (the JMI simply doesn't holdthe STL11k), so I figured I'd try it with the FSQ extender to see what came out.

Not an amazing shot, but still, better than the Sombrero I've got on June'08 (less than a year ago) with the NP101, the 40D and a BigBarlow, so I'm happy :-)

Oh and I didn't frame the object incorrectly. The original field is huge and what you see is a rotated & cropped version.I don't know... I felt like tilting the galaxy and placing it on the side.If you want to see a reduced version of the  original stretched luminance, click on the image, and you'll see how littlespce the galaxy actually occupies in the field of view.

L: 6x5', RGB: 4x5' each channel
Total: 90 minutes

The night of 4/24 while "killing" time waiting for the main target of the night, I got some data from M104 and the galaxy shown here: M63.

It's not a jaw dropping image by all means, but considering it's only 90 minutes of data I think it turned out ok, and considering this kind of target is not ideal for the FSQ, I think it turned out much better than what I expected after seeing the calibrated image.

L: 6x10', RGB: 3x3' each channel
Total: 2 hours

On the night of April 19th, I went to Dinosaur Point to do some imaging. After I was done shooting the target of that night (which btw I had to end up throwing away completely) I was planning to point at the rising Sagittarius, and take a shot at two popular objects and a (dwarf) planet that happened to be around... It wasn't the main object of the night, I only had little time, it was very low in the horizon, etc. so I wasn't aiming at capturing something outstanding at all, but still I didn't want to leave without it!

Not a lot of data because as I said, it was getting late, I had gone out the night before as well, next day I had to go to work, etc.

The black triangle at the right-bottom is not a defect, neither me being creative with a black paintbrush. It's a mountain I started when the object was still kind of low, and rather than discarding the first couple of subs, I decided to include it in the rest. The mountain itself was shot with my Canon 40D on a tripod, and pasted afterwards overlapping the "moved" mountain in the first two subs, but a "mountain-free" image is also possible and in fact my first processing didn't include it, but after looking at both, I kind of like it more with the terrestrial feature even I wasn't able to get any details out of it other than the silhouette.

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L: 22x10'
RGB: 5x5' each channel
Total: 3.6 hours

This image is a reprocess done on March 2010 of the original image taken on April 2009