M42 - the Good, the Bad and the Ugly

[Mike in Rancho]

Good going Ron, glad the new equipment is working as planned.

For a more accurate test though, I'd think you'd have to try to process them a bit more equivalently. M[agenta]42 seems to have a greater stretch, and perhaps different channel balance.

You'd probably have to just eyeball it rather than duplicate log settings, as with the acquisition now different it's likely that dynamic modules like Wipe and OptiDev will produce different results. Not to mention color channels will have different stuff in them.

But it seems promising. Slightly worries me as well, as my Optolong LRGB set seems to edge over left of 400 by a fair amount.

[dx_ron]

I wasn't going for a full-on comparison test, as there's little cost (image-quality-wise) to using the more stringent filter.

Your LRGB imaging shouldn't be impacted, because you're using a newt, right? The RGB part won't be affected regardless, as long as you focus for each filter. The L could have some star-size issues if your using a less than perfectly corrected refractor. Even with a refractor, the need for the L3 filter depends on the telescope. My AT65EDQ shows zero issues with the wider uv/ir filter.