ASTRO: NGC 1514

Weather has been awful here, both November and December only had one night
suitable for imaging.
My December image was NGC 1514, which I chose mainly because it is rather
bright. Transparency was not really good, so it didn't make sense to go for
something faint.
As I found in recent month that some planetary nebulae don't gain a lot from
narrow band filters even under city skies I remembered that I had
successfully used an Astronomik UHC filter for black and white images of
planetaries in the past. I own the Astronomik UHC in 1.25 and 2 inches, but
my filter wheel takes 36mm unmounted filters, so now I own three of these
filters :-)
Astronomik filters are only 1mm thick compared to the 2mm of my Baader
filters, so I also ordered an Astronomik luminance filter and put both in
the same slot of my filter wheel. This way they are parfocal with my Baader
filters, at least with my rather slow (f/8 with reducer) Meade ACF. A faster
scope probably would need refocusing.
I was very satisfied with this filter stack, the UHC filtered images were
vastly superior to luminance and blue filtered images. Unfortunately I did
not take OIII frames, it would have been interesting to compare them to UHC.
Original image scale was 0,56"/pixel and sharpness would have been good
enough for a full size picture, but I used 1.5*1.5 software binning to
reduce noise for a final image scale of 0,84"/pixel.

Taken from the middle of Berlin with a 10" Meade ACF, CCDT67 reducer for
1985mm focal length, G11 mount, Atik 383L+ camera, 12x10m Astronomik UHC,
5x10m Baader RGB each.

http://ccd-astronomy.de/temp7/1514coloursmallgut.jpg

Stefan