One day, my 13-year-old came with me to help paint the observatory. That night, I asked him to pick a target or two and let him "drive" the RedCat 51. He's not really interested in astrophotography, but it was really fun to show him how it all works and to actually get him involved in target selection and monitoring.
We only had a single short summer night, but we captured both targets (the other being M51). When I stacked them, I was surprised how well such a short integration turned out. I'm pretty excited, so I'm going to metal-print both of these so he can have something to remember the trip by.
In this version I tried extracting the stars and dimming the entire star field before adding them back in. This seemed to work slightly better than morphological transformation, but I think I will return to this image and more selectively mask the stars in the near future.
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