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What is the extent of the faintest, and most obscure sections of this famous object? To help answer this question, this deep set of images were taken at our ultra dark sky site of Happy Jack, Arizona. Countless stars can be seen in this image, along with numerous small isolated patches of nebulosity that are unnamed. In processing this image, the common practice of applying the minimum filter in PS was not used simply because the effect of removing most of the faint stars made the image look unrealistic, and I wanted to preserve the striking stellar background.

Some notes on image size.

JPG compression will not work very well on images with great amounts of fine detail in them. Here, there are so many tiny stars here that the file size is difficult to minimize without greatly sacrificing quality. Please bear with the download times, the larger files are worth the fine details to be had!

Instrument:  8" f/1.5 Celestron Schmidt Camera
Platform:  Homemade GEM
Film:  Kodak Supra 400
CCD Autoguider: ST4
Exposure:  2x8mins
Filters:  NONE
Location:  Happy Jack, Arizona
Elevation:  6800 ft.
Sky:  Seeing 8/10, Transparency 8/10
Outside Temperature:  10 C
Processing: Photoshop, PW Pro.

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