Ok I'm not gonna lie. This is probably bragging

[Dave Lane]

Originally Posted by DaFace

You don't have to go into 3 million other things, but would you mind giving us the cliffs notes? For example...

1. What type of telescope and camera did you use?
2. When you say 45 hours, I assume that's spread out over a very long period of time. I assume there's some sort of computerized system to keep it pointed in the right direction all that time?
3. I assume you did at least some post-processing to clean it up, but can you expand on how much was required?

Really fantastic work for (I assume) a hobbyist.

Ill give you more of the details. This was actually shot with a QHY 12 which is a One Shot Color camera. There is just over 45 hours of exposure. Since this is a OSC camera its really the equivalent of 135 hours of RBG data. There were about 10 hours of 20 minute exposures and 10 hours of 15 minute exposures I think that really helped with the dust. The rest were 5 and 10 minutes exposures. I gathered them from mid November till early January. The telescope was a Williams Optics GTF refractor of 81mm aperture.

I just happen to love M45 and really wanted to get as much detail as was humanly possible from down here on earth. The imaging was taken about 80 miles south of Kansas City in a pretty remote area. No towns over 100 population for 20 miles. It has very favorable skies.

This is pretty much what I've been sending to inquiries today. And yes it does track the sky on an odd looking mount. If you want I'l put a video up so you can see how it looks in fast motion.