AstronomyUkraine

Update! Since having this mishap with my mount, the weather here has been great, 6 out of 7 clear nights. I reckon I have lost around 35 hours of imaging time, tonight is also going to be clear. It will be another week at least before I receive the tools needed to do a good repair on the mount. I wish I had just drilled out the hole, tapped it for a 12 mm bolt, and left it at that, except the same thing could happen again. At least with a steel insert, the threads won't get stripped. Brian

Looks great John. I've passed over this target a few times. Stellarium doesn't show the amount of Ha present in this target, which is quite abundant looking at your image. Brian

Well done to the top 3. All excellent images.

If it gets to over £700, I would sooner buy a new one anyway.

It's over £500 now with 4 days left.

I was amazed myself, and both images had the same simple stretch with STF and HistogramTransformation.

I have two white Skywatcher weights on my mount, and a black Celestron weight. It does the job, so I don't worry about it.

Could be worse, you could own a Software Bisque ME II mount. 465 euro for a 13.5kg counterweight.

If your view E/SE is not restricted, you have quite a few good targets to go for. All of them are globular star clusters. M3, M5, M13, M92. M3 has the highest altitude in the early evening, around 10pm.

I'm guessing it wasn't dandelion & burdock then? 😁 Someone else located in London mentioned a large amount of satellite activity over the London area.

This is the same dynamic combination process used on HOO data. The PixelMath formula is different, but the processing is exactly the same. Instead of mixing the HOO and dynamic HOO in a 50/50 mix, this combination was 30/70. The top image is the usual HOO combination. The second image is the HOO/dynamic HOO mix. The most startling difference, besides the colour, is the amount of detail in the second image compared to the first one. The background nebulosity is also more prominent.

Until you try removing them from your DSLR images. 😀

Looks great. Way too low in the sky from my location. One advantage of having telescopes in Spain, capturing these low altitude targets that would be difficult to image from the UK. Brian

This technique certainly makes a difference to the normal SHO combination. Going to try it on a HOO image to see if it improves those too.

M44 is almost in a due West direction, slightly to the South. RA 08 40.4 Dec 19° 59'