When I got started in this hobby in the early 1950's no one was taking deep sky photos. Only special 103 emulsions from Kodak worked very well and they needed constant refrigeration, freezer was better. They were very costly. Mounts couldn't track well with horrid periodic error and other errors. Slow motions were coarse with too much backlash yet cost a year's salary. Finally Evered Kreimer and others found film like Tri-X in a vacuum, cooled by dry ice had good astro properties. This was better than the oven baked ammonia bath's I used before, smelling up the kitchen something awful. I even experimented with liquid nitrogen. Hypered 2415 changed the whole hobby as with usable film good mounts started to show up and amateur astrophotography took off. Finally we could image stuff only observatories could before. CCD's gave us another magnitude jump in capabilities. Great mounts still aren't cheap but they don't cost even close to a year's salary any more.

So I love comparing what we can do today compared to the major observatories. The gap keeps closing. Today Frazier posted a link to Dr. Pamela Gay's article on these two Compact Galaxy Groups (CGG) each containing 4 galaxies no matter what the name is.
http://www.starstryder.com/2007/10/0...ompact-groups/

She included a Hubble shot of Stephan's Quintet and a ground based shot. I imaged both though Stephan's Quintet was done before I had color capability. It's now well placed for an update if the clouds ever clear. It's drizzling as I type this.

I just had to drag out my shots out for comparison. Considering I paid over a billion dollars less than Hubble cost it's not a bad comparison. Read her article about these guys, it is very good.

Note the arc of 4 red galaxies (look like stars in my shot but you can see they are galaxies in Hubble's shot). They are red for the same reason my IC 10 shot shows so much red color. In this case the dust has been pulled out of the CGG rather than in our galaxy. The effect is the same. They help show the dust extends far beyond what is illuminated by starlight. My shots have North at the top.

Seyfert's Sextet: L=4x10' binned 2x2, RGB=2x10' binned 3x3.
Stephan's Quintet: L=6x10' binned 2x2

Both were processed when I only had 8 bit software so the histograms aren't perfectly smooth. I need to redo them. But the difference is small and below my ability to see it other than in the histogram.

Other's who post here can do better than this. My seeing is bad and these were processed early in my short time doing CCD imaging.

Rick

Attached Images

	SeyfertsSextet4x10rgb2x10x3r3crop1a.jpg (32.8 KB, 32 views)
	StephansQuintet.jpg (104.3 KB, 29 views)

Both photos are oustanding! Shows lots of details and surely are keepers Thanks for sharing Rick. Clear Skies, sorry for late response was on a business trip just got back.