Excellent effort, Patrick. But remember what Jerry wrote. Imaging can be data-taking, too. It's the choice of filters that determines the scientific value of your image. Once you start imaging with narrowband filters, for example, you are essentially exploring a type of spectroscopy. And even the plain-old "pretty picture" often has value in determining things like morphology or in population studies. Most people forget that the Hubble telescope wasn't sent up merely to take pretty pictures. The filters selected for the various cameras were chosen with scientific goals in mind. What the public sees is the result of much work on the ground, assigning and balancing colors to data originally taken for different purposes. You've been into positional imaging for a long time, but it's not the only form of data accquistion possible with telescope and camera. That said, most amateur astro-imagers are just in it for the "pretty picture" and have no scientific goals; the same as the average visual observer. The end result bears no resemblence to the actual object and is more in the realm of art than science- (remember some years ago in S&T, when Jay Ryan noted that if you were embedded in the middle of the Orion Nebula, it would still appear dim & gray?) but I think it's the zen of the activity itself, more than the results, that attracts many practitioners. I'd like to see you continue to explore tri-color imaging, as time permits. On Tue, Apr 29, 2008 at 4:24 AM, Patrick Wiggins <paw@wirelessbeehive.com> wrote:

I hate to think how many hours I've invested in this project. But at least now I have something to show for it. See the NGC 5055 image at:

http://gallery.utahastronomy.com/main.php?g2_itemId=10620&g2_page=2

Now that I've done it once it probably wont take as long next time (at least I hope not <grin>).

Data still wins but maybe taking pretty pictures isn't all that bad.