It's interesting to note that when I started shooting at the Sagittarius area, the Pleiades weren't even above the horizon, but by the time I've got to that part of the sky, they were already all the way up there.

Now, for the fun part, if you mouse over the image, you will see a digitally altered image of what our eyes could see that night, more or less. If you move the mouse out of the image, you see what the camera could catch. The idea is for those who have never seen the Milky Way from a very dark site, to give them an idea of what it would look like - so maybe they get excited about visiting a dark site and enjoy the night sky!

Have you ever been to a very dark site? I'd like to hear what you think. Do you see the image of the "visual" Milky Way too bright compared to what you see at a very dark site? Too dark? Perhaps the image is too "glowy"? Not enough contrast? Please let me know in the comments below!

First you see the Swift image (not mine!) and if you move your mouse over the image, you can then see the image I took. Moving the mouse in and out of the image you can compare the two images.

I did this to see how the details in the core of my image matched those details - whenever visible - in the Ultraviolet image from the Swift spacecraft.

I "blinked" several images from other authors - sometimes after a bit of tweaking to reveal the details in the core in such images - to make sure the details I was obtaining were not processing artifacts, and also made this animation:

Please note:

• The quality of the images used in this animation is not great. In particular the "slides" from Tony Hallas and Robert Gendler are at a much lower resolution than the original images from these two fine astrophotographers. The purpose of this animation is not to compare the QUALITY of the images, but only to verify whether the details in my image are real or artifacts - or both.
• Just because a particular image does not show more details in the core than another does NOT mean the image is of a lesser quality, not at all. Different images will have different goals when imaging M31 (or any other target). Again, the only reason to post these images is verify if the details in mine are real, not a competition to see who revealed more or less details.
• To me, the most revealing comparison is the one with the image from Mark Jenkins and Roland Christen, and that's why I placed their "slide" right after the visualization of my image.
• While none of my images are subject to traditional copyright and instead use a Creative Commons License, because this animation uses images subject to copyright by their authors as indicated in the next bullet, copy or reproduction of this animation is not allowed.
• Portion of M31 image from Tony Hallas is Copyright by Tony and Daphne Hallas
  Portion of M31 image from Robert Gendler is Copyright by Robert Gendler
  Portion of M31 image from Vicent Peris and JL Lamadrid is Copyright by Vicent Peris and JL Lamadrid
  Portion of M31 image from from Mark Jenkins and Roland Christen is Copyright by Mark Jenkins and Roland Christen
  
 

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.

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.

This by the way is probably the last time I bin 2x2 for the RGBs. IMO, it's not worth it. Also, despite I spent processing the image not much longer than one hour, I think I over processed the main galaxies a bit more, and left the background a bit too dark.

Last Saturday I went up to Coe to end up the RGBs of an image I've been trying to capture for weeks. Since I only needed a couple of hours for that, and I still had plenty of time to do something else (I started around 11pm and at 1am I was already finished), I decided to do a quick capture of the Virgo Galaxy Cluster, as it was already well positioned in the sky. I had the FSQ with the focal reducer, and although it's not usual to take this area with such a big field, I decided to leave the reducer in the scope. Kepe in mind however that at almost 5 arcsecs per pixel, the resolution and details cannot be too impressive. The RGBs aren't perfectly aligned, something I need to look into.