Observation Log - June 24, 2000 - Tinton Falls, NJ

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M57, the Ring Nebula, a planetary nebula in Lyra, magnitude 8.8, diameter 76 seconds, distance 1,140 light years. Images were taken between 11:32 pm and 02:58 am, the night of June 23/24. This is an LRGB shot taken with a 19 minute luminance channel, and 10 minutes each in red, green and blue. This image in interesting in that the luminance channel was taken without the f/6.3 focal reducer, giving a little larger image scale with the native f/6.3 focal length of the 10" Meade LX200. Each of the color channels, though, was shot with the focal reducer in place. Each of the color channels was then resampled to match the image scale of the luminance channel. Each of the channels was composited separately after dark frame removal and flat fielding. The luminance channel was then processed with Maximum Entropy Deconvolution and Digital Development (FFT, low-pass, hard.) The RGB channels were then combined, realigned and color smoothed with a low-pass kernel filter.