My first try with LRGB...

well, I finally had a few minutes to try out my new filter wheel for the first time. Not expecting much, given the nearly full moon and my lack of experience. 11" SCT @ aproximately f/5.5 (I need to determine my actual field of view with this reducer combination). ST-2000xm w/ cfw-8; lum binned 2x2, color binned 3x3. LRGB @ 15/6/6/6. Would have liked to get more time, but I need to take it easy; I just got out of the hospital this morning. Comments/tips greatly appreciated

Attached Image:

Very good first try Andrew. M27 has nice detail and you also
captured some star colors.

The red channel is not aligned correctly with the green
and blue channels. This appears as a bright red crescent
above bright stars. If you spilt the image into RGB
components and align them the RGB combination image should
be corrected.

The star of the stars and sharpness of M27 can be improved
by subtracting and edge image from the realigned image.

The image would look as shown below.

Mike

Attached Image:

Very nicely done. It's very hard to get good color when the moon is out. A few tips:

* You can increase color saturation to deepen the colors. How you do it depends on what software you are using.

* You can probably drop the sky brightness a bit more. Do this by raising your black point for the color image (all three channels at once if you have a choice).

* Do you have some light pollution? The image has a slight green cast. You might try cutting just the green channel a little bit (use a gamma of 0.95, or Curves in Photoshop or a similar tool).

Ron Wodaski
author of "The New CCD Astronomy"
http://www.newastro.com