[rcheshire (Rowland)]

This image was taken at the Snake Valley Camp last weekend. A very tight fit and mostly experimental. Two versions, subdued and contrasting?

The sub frames are a little under exposed and too few to really make things pop. A little StarTools magic (not the Magic module) teased out the detail, while doing a very good job on the noise.

Preprocessing in Pixinsight and post processing in StarTools, using the additional Luminance channel technique to allow further stretching of the colours.

The bias and dark frames are twelve months old and were taken with my regulated cooled Canon 1000D, at -5C. Pretty good consistency. The camera maintained -5C +/- 0.5C all night over the weekend.

Despite heavy dew both nights, the camera and scope ran dew free. It was a delight to see the dew controllers inside the camera and on the scope perform very well.

I have a bit to learn about keeping bright stars like Antares under control, and, I have a faint suspicion that several of the images may have been taken with the focus mask in place. Rather than discard them, I am prepared to put up with those big spikes emanating from Antares. But there is room for improvement.