A few years ago I pointed the astrograph at Betelgeuse just to see what a 5+ hour long exposure would look like (it was very cool... but I now really need to go back and reprocess it). I figured I would do the same for Aldebaran since I know it is in the direction of the Taurus Molecular cloud with dust in the area.
So... here it is.
At the top right of the field is
Sh2-239 . When I took the high resolution image of it in 2008... it was the first good resolution color of this nebula in existence (as far as I know). It was such a different and wonderful kind of object- that I then made it point of visit many more Taurus Molecular Cloud objects. In the survey imagery of the time- these objects did not look like much and it was a "risk" to spend the hours necessary to see it (and hope something interesting was there. Sh2-239 was a huge discovered treasure for me.
In this Aldebaran image the exposure time is roughly 5 hours in each of RGB filters.
Obviously I did not "tame" or beat down the brightness of the Bull's eye. I personally think this kind of representation communicates what a luminary it is in the sky with some stuff in the background.
-adam
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