This was the very first of my images that
made it into APOD, which happened only after
many, many kicks at the can!
Please kick on the "Original" thumbnail on the right to bring up the actual, full resolution image (for some reason, on APOD the image is displayed only at a significantly reduced scale).
This is the third image that I completed using my new "Final Frontier Telescope". It is a combination of just over 10 hours of subframes, which were shot between mid-July and mid-August of this year (260 minutes luminance and 350 minutes RGB, all un-binned). I reduced the image size for final presentation by 75%, since collimation and mount tracking had not yet been fully optimized when the raw subs were acquired. The final plate scale is about 0.62"/pixel, and the angular image size after cropping is about 28' x 30'.
Comments