The Seven Sisters

A year back, I took five hours of LRGB images of Messier 45, known as the Pleiades or the Seven Sisters. This is a reasonably bright object in the night sky and easy to see with the naked eye. Since then, this data has sat on my hard drive due to some optical artifacts in the stars and struggles with processing such little data. I now have a robust LRGB Workflow, and in the data went.

Note: image is reduced in size and quality for uploading.

It turned out well for being around 15% of the amount of data I would typically try to get. An example of the optical artifact is below:

The central star here has some artifacts on the left and right sides. This appears to be some diffraction issue where something at the edge of the telescope is causing light be bent or reflected. I think there were a few issues here causing this:

• I didn't have the correct adapters and extenders, causing the distance from the camera to the telescope to be off by around 0.5mm.
  • I have since fixed this by getting custom-made adapters at the correct lengths.
• The dew shield was slightly obstructing the primary objective lens of the telescope due to being cockeyed.
  • This just needed a simple readjustment.
• There was, and still is, a significant amount of Tilt in the optical system caused by poor quality control of my camera's sensor.
  • This is the next thing that I'm in the process of fixing. I have a special camera tilting unit that needs a night to dial in.