M44 The Beehive Cluster

This iamge was taken with my 80mm refractor, a Vixen Atlux mount, PHD autoguiding and an Atik 383L mono CCD camera.

I captured ten-minute sub-frames with matching dark-frames, and combined them with flat-field frames to reduce the effect of vignetting in the final image.

The total exposure times were 20 minutes using a H-alpha filter, 10 minutes using a SII filter and 20 minutes using an OIII filter. I used H-alpha for the red channel, SII for the green channel and OIII for the blue channel.

M44