I had such a busy day today so I finally just got around to doing some image processing. So here is my late report…

THe picnic was great and the solar system hike was a lot of fun. It was nice seeing all the members and their families. During the afternoon many scopes were set up for sun spot and solar flare viewing. As the evening wore on, the Binbrook scenery started to get very pretty.

After getting my scope and AP gear set up and aligned I started to image M17 (swan/omega nebula). I never really had an interest in imaging this target but I decided to give it try anyway especially since it won’t be high in the sky for long… and really I am so happy that I did. I experimented a bit to see what the results would be like if I used the 6in SCT without the focal reducer… so I was imaging at f10 instead of f6.3. making my scope a 1500mm lens. Because of this, it made it harder to get good tracking (with DSI on the 80mm as autoguider) on the stars so I had to limit my exposures to only 2.5 min each. I collected over 1 hour of data. Because of the long focal length, M17 took up a decent portion of the frame, so I only had to do a bit of cropping. I’ll post the higher res and full frame version on my website when I get the chance.

M17 Swan/Omega Nebula

KerryLH