M57 - The Ring Nebula, 3x120 second

From about 8 frames captured, only 3 were worthy of stacking - I have found being very discriminatory with the calibrated images really does improve the end result. This image is unprocessed, but saving it as jpeg does not look good.  I have still to collimate the telescope, and this is also before I cleaned the optics yesterday.  Deconvolution does not work well on wide-field images such as this.  It's much better at bring out detail in nebula, galaxies, and other finer structures.

Having stacked the image I decided to crop it very close to the centre, and then played about more with the deconvolution settings in MaximDL.  It brings out a little more detail and contrast in the (relatively) hot centre of the nebula, and the cooler outer regions, but as this is a raw single-shot colour based image with only a light pollution filter, not much detail of the nebula comes through.  Can't wait to start using hydrogen-alpha and combining that data, but the telescope and camera are not suited to such small objects - the resolution falls off a cliff when zoomed in to this level.  However, given the time of year, weather, and other limiting factors, I have had no choice but to image objects that are unsuitable for my set up.  It is a good learning experience though...

For a much better idea of what I could be producing if someone gave me half a billion dollars, or a few hours with the HST, see here.