Date: 6/12/2010
Location: San Bruno, CA – near the SFO airport…
Telescope: C9.25 at F/D 6.3 with Focal reducer / corrector
Mount: Atlas Mount with Orion Short tube 80mm and Star Shoot autoguider
Camera: QHY8 – with Astronomic CLS CCD Filter.
17 exposures of 420 seconds bin 2×2 (False color) – processed with MaximDL5. Dark, Flat field, and biais images were used.
Post processing with Photoshop CS4, Noise Ninja, and Focus Magic.
I used layers and careful processing to make sure details in the center of the Nebula are not over-saturated / lost. It is one of the first picture I processed with Noise Ninja, and I like all the controls it provides compared to NeatImage (another noise reduction program).
Astrophotography in Urban Environment 