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7/24/03 M17 The LOBSTER

Beautiful M17 goes by many names; The Omega Nebula, The Lobster, The Swan. It's a beautiful object, hard for me to image as it never gets too high above the horizon. Since obtaining my color filter wheel, I've noticed that shots with the focal reducer in place show significant field curvature. This is evident by the stars in all 4 corners of my images elongating toward the center of the image. I need to get the focal reducer closer to the imaging chip to eliminate this problem. I spent many hours processing this one until I was satisfied. I think my processing skills are improving, but are still far from where they need to be. I took an image of this object a couple years ago with the SAC7 and the ETX70 (lower on this page) that makes an interesting comparison.