Saturn

Or NGC 7009. This was a target of opportunity when I had the focal reducer off, so the image scale is ~.71"/pixel. The seeing was somewhere between medium-poor and why bother. (Mix of conditions and object elevation.)

LRGB - 51x1min, then 24,20,16minutes in 2min subs. This is really bright near the middle, so I couldn't take any longer L subs. And you can see by the weird mix of times that many had to be thrown out. FWHM > ~4"!

I don't know what to say about the color. Usually I like to do a "calculated" rather than "auto" color scaling in AstroArt, but this time it turned out WAY blue. So I cut down on blue and then ended up increasing the red while post processing. It still looks blue to me. And I did increase the intensity on all colors a tiny bit before sending it to photoshop.

I wonder how many of the faint stars are really galaxies, as most don't show up in TheSky. And I can't use the seeing to tell this time. Maybe this is a target to try next summer?

Suggestions for improvement? Thanks for looking.

Charlie

Attached Image:

Color looks good to me but it feels a bit soft.
If it wasn't focus issue it must have been the seeing.
Some of the stars in corners are multicolor.

Bright & Colorful! 8)
Gotta love these small planetaries...

Thats a tough target you picked there Charles!

Boy do I here you on the seeing,I get plenty of poor seeing over here on the East side of the mountains.Good seeing would be a must to get detail on this one!

The color looks pretty good to me,I have visually observed this on a couple occasions,it appeared very Blue and bright.

Did you try any deconvolution on this?that may tighten up the stars some.

Nice job under the tough conditions,it looks good!

Jason

Thanks for the comments all. I have played with some de-convolution, but with mixed success. In this particular case I will blame most of the problem on seeing. This is also a real "stretch" to my processing abilities, as all of the central detail is WAY brighter than anything in the background.

Charlie