Night of the Triffids

This will probably be the last of M20 for me this season, since there are so many other objects I want to shoot. SO my final stack for this image was 260 frames of 30 seconds at ISO 3200, plus over 900 individual reference frames. Another 1500 or so 30 second subs were rejected, for a total of roughly 15 hours of exposure times. That is the secret to doing more with less equipment-add time, persistence, and some OCD.

Compared to the shot posted a couple of days ago, this is far smoother, more detailed, and shows a lot more depth-to me, it's starting to look like a place, not just an object. There are features in the dark clouds that I never actually have seen before, even in the better known professional images. It gives the impression that if I continued adding to the stack, the dusty clouds and globules would just keep appearing around the edges. In reality, the dust clouds DO extend on and on, but without bright stars in or near them, we can only see them in the infrared or infer their presence by the thinning of the background stars. The Spitzer IR images of the area show just how much there is in the area. For all practical purposes, this is about all that can be grabbed with an 8" scope in such light-polluted skies, and it did take a fairly silly amount of time to make. Better equipment would give tighter star images. Better resolution would be possible, but the only practical way to get much more of that is with more aperture. Still, I'm pretty happy with it.

Click the pic for a 1500 pixel view.