This is a picture of the Leo Triplet that I took with the 4" on a beautiful summer evening back in June. In fact this was one of the first LRGB images that I had taken - or so I thought. Every time I tried to process this image, it came out looking funny.
This has been a common problem for me with any images taken through the Clear/Red/Green/Blue filter set. True, I have had my challenges with things like focussing, flats, etc...my latest problem is that it's becoming obvious that the spacing is not correct between the ccd chip and the focal reducer. But the images I've been processing have really been odd looking with respect to color.
This all came to a head with my latest endeavor to image M31. I collected the data last week but just could not get it to look right. So today I visited my friend and ccd mentor, Dean, who immediately solved my problem. Turns out I had switched the green and blue filters in the camera's filter wheel, and, well, green is not blue nor is blue green, if you know what I mean. Needless to say I felt rather foolish, but also relieved as this discovery will allow me to fix up a bunch of images.
So, here is one of the first. Actually unless you zoom in there is not a lot of evident color. But actually, Spiral Galaxy M65 (on the top right) has some nice color, showing red in HII regions and blue in regions of newly born star clusters.
On the bottom right is Spiral Galaxy M66, and to the left is the nicely shaped edge-on Spiral Galaxy NGC3628, which shows an interesting structure of dark dust lanes.
One other item of interest - last night, the European Space Agency's SMART-1 spacecraft crashed into the moon. Although it was supposed to be visible here in Tucson, the skies were cloudy. It's quite cloudy these days as we receive the side effects from Hurricane John in the Pacific.
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