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Scope: ST80 at f/2.5 Location: Del Mar, CA, 12/28/2003 Camera: ToUcam SC3
Exposure: 10 x 90 sec H-Alpha exposure. 18 x 4 sec exposures with IR Block filter.16 x 4 sec each RGB exposures. Four Frame Mosaic
Processing: Captured and stacked in K3CCDTools with HA, IR,,R,G,B saved as FITs. HA, IR,RGB masters were co-registered in Astroart. Some Lowpass filtering was applied on the HA and IR channels. HA and IR were combined for Luminance. HA and Red combined for red. These combinations and LRGB combine were done in Photoshop. Luminance Layering was used. Each quadrant of the mosaic was color balanced in Photoshop and background smoothed with SGBNR.. The well known "Ear" artifacts typical with webcams were removed with Loreal. Final mosaic joining and touch up in Photoshop.
This image was taken in my light polluted neighborhood in Del Mar. The field is rather wide for this object, but I felt the image was still pleasing. The star field appears dense, but it is a pretty starry section of the sky and the Max depth is about Mag 14. Horizontal FOV is about 164'