Near the center of the Rosette Nebula in the constellation Monoceros is an attractive open cluster. My daughter wanted another try at this deep sky object, after her first attempt a few years ago. I think we fared better this time, though still did not collect as many frames as we would have liked.
Nearly 400 frames from our new front driveway in the cul-de-sac. Given the amount of ambient light we had to deal with, I think it would be better to take this shot with a filter. Pushed post-processing on this one and added my own unsharp mask manually at the end.
Having second thoughts about continuing to use the field flattener. Why?! Well, the AT8RC is *supposed* to be largely coma free and the flattener is just another lense reducing transmission of photons in the optical chain. Was the field really that bad before? I don't recall. Maybe the RC scope needs colimation. When the image is finally processed, it is always cropped into my poster template. Wouldn't any aberrations in the outer field be removed? I recall images taken before the flattener were brighter. What about optical curvature? Well, calibrating each image frame with the flat takes care of that. Just need to create a new flat without the field flattener in place. Hmmmmm...haven't I been here before?
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