Michelle Stone

The above is my image. Taken with a C14, F6.3 focal reducer, and ST7.? 20 minutes of luminance exposures of 60 seconds each at bin 2, 8 minutes of RGB exposures of 60 seconds each at bin 3. This exposure is a full frame shot. Other than some color correction, I have done no further processing on the image.

Benoit Schillings

Benoit Schillings posts this image of M66. This image was taken with a C11 at F/10 with an ST-7 and an AO-7. Exposure time was 3x20 minutes, this is taken from by very badly light poluted backyard in the San Francisco bay area.
False Color applied.

I have reduced Benoit's original image size to match that of the other photos here. The full image can be seen at:

http://www.astroccd.com/mars/benoit/m66.html

Benoit's home page is at: http://www.astroccd.com/mars/benoit/

Points to consider:

	Benoit used SBIG's adaptive optics, extended esposures, no color.
	Benoit is much better at this than I am!
	The C11 is a much smaller instrument than the C14 that I use.? This demonstrates that skill and technique count for a lot!
	Wil Malin writes: It also illustrates, if it needed illustrating, that one can't cheat physics. There is a hard limit to the resolution that a 6-inch aperture can achieve, no matter how expensively produced, and any decent scope of significantly larger aperture will handily out-resolve it any time. For high resolution in amateur-sized scopes, aperture counts far more than price or optical design.

Robert Gendler

This shot is by Robert Gendler and is a small cutout of the larger framed image that he took.? The full frame image can be seen at:

http://www.geocities.com/CapeCanaveral/Hall/6432/Leo.html

His web site can be seen at:

http://www.geocities.com/CapeCanaveral/Hall/6432/homepage.html

What I did is to select the galaxy from his image.? I stored it as a Genuine Fractals image.? I then enlarged the image by 300 % and reduced it to 66%.? There is nothing scientific about the procedure... it was just done to match image size.

Points to consider:

	M66 is a rather bright galaxy, so that should be taken into consideration when making a head to head comparison (if that can be done at all).??
	Some processing went into The image including DDP, and some sharpening.?
	Robert's image was enlarged considerably with Genuine Fractals and then reduced.
	I do not know the exposure time of Robert's image.

I would have to say that the refractor and ST8 combination does a tremendous job on this object.? The ST8/refractor combination also provides a superior field of view.? Enough to get the companion galaxies in the same frame.? (See Robert's site for the full image) I really encourage you to see his image since this represents such a small piece of it.

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