Scope: Megrez II f/2.6 Location: Del Mar, CA 12 Jan. 2005 Camera: ToUcam SC3
Exposure: 18 x 48 sec and 16 x 16 sec Luminance Exposures with IR Block and Orion SkyGlo filters. 15 x 16 sec RGB Exposures
Processing: Images were captured in K3CCDTools 2. Aligned/stacked in Registax 3 and saved as FITS. Luminance and Color channels were scaled and rough color balanced in IRIS. Channels were co-registered in IRIS. The 48 sec IR block exposure was used as the main luminance channel. The 16 sec luminance exposure was used to minimize star size on the larger stars. Minimum and Gaussian blur filters with mask for bright stars were applied to the luminance construction. Luminance and Color FITS were combined in Photoshop with Luminance Layering. Color balancing and final touches in Photoshop. SGBNR (PixInsight LE) was used to smooth background noise on final result. Image was resized to 800 x 600.
This image was taken at a light polluted site - so the skyglo filter was used. This was a guided image. NGC 752 is a visually large Open Cluster in the constellation of Andromeda. Its apparently large size indicates its relative closeness. Horizontal FOV is 80'