Photographic Messier Marathon Album

M17
 

In 1999, the eleven year old negatives from the photographic Messier Marathon on March 19/20, 1988 were scanned at low resolution (675 dpi) on a Polaroid Sprint 35 Plus Scanner and converted to JPG or GIF images for display on this web page. Several of the original negatives were missing, and their images can not be displayed here. All the negatives were processed in Photoshop 5.0 and Corel Photo-Paint 8.0 to improve contrast and to remove dust specks, scratches, and blue static electricity marks. Most of the images were cropped to reduce the image size and improve the image composition. Many of the original negatives produced very good images without much processing. Other negatives had few scratches or static electricity marks, but their images were poor because of underexposure or significant star trailing from poor guiding or wind gusts. The following images are representative examples of those with significant static electricity marks. The before images show the pictures as they originally appeared on the negatives. The after images show them after considerable processing:

"Contact Sheets" of the Messier Objects

* An object recorded as M85 on the original negative list does not match M85's appearance shown by The Sky and MegaStar as well as by CCD images of M85 taken at the 3towers Observatory. It has not yet been identified and must have been mistaken for M85 in the rush to photograph as many objects as possible on Messier Marathon night.

** The image recorded as M12 on the original negative list is actually that of M10. In the frenzy of the Messier Marathon night, M10 mistakenly was photographed twice and M12 missed.