This a tale of two telescopes sitting half a world apart. One over here in the England's East Midlands and another one over there in the Atacama desert, Chile.

M77 has been in my bucket list for ages. First tried out in 2006 and for what I got wasn't too bad either considering it wasn't guided. As I resolved to get rid of my "unfinished business" list earlier this year M77 was sitting high in my priority list. Tried as I might imaging it, running along the equator, is still a fool's quest at my latitude. 8 and half hours of imaging full of frustration and beset by the usual and no so usual gremlins I was ready to toss the towel in... again.

So I tried remote imaging from one of the best skies in the world (bitter pill to swallow, I know, I know...). Yet it failed again. Again all sort of gremlins in action there, you wouldn't believe). All I could save were two (2) 600s luminance frames, one with some tracking error the other one ok.

So here is the idea: Put together both data sets and come up with a combined luminance (Chile+Lincoln via adding the final RGB layers in a synthetic luminance) and using the RGB as colour layer to past the luminance on top of. I used the smaller scale (Chile, at 0.96"/px), registered the 3 frames to create the final luminance frame. The relative weight is arrived from the following math:

Lincoln Equivalent Exposure Time = ratio of apertures squared x 1/3 (assuming equal bandwidth across the colour filter in the ZWO camera) x ratio of pixel resolution squared x effective imagine time, which yields:

453 min x 0.16 x 0.333 x 0.66 = 16 min, so approximately 40% of the luminance is from Lincoln and the remainder from ChileScope.

In the end you can only give due recognitation only to one site, not two, in AstroBin and I feel that effort wise mine was considerable higher than theirs over there. Still, to give their due, without their luminance there would still not be a M77 image in my catalog.