Another from last week, this was my planned target for the night, although in the end the carina nebula I did for a test came out better.
I waited until this crossed the meridian to avoid having to flip, and by then the conditions weren't as good. Guiding was sitting around 1.2 - 1.3 by that stage.
Ended up capturing 77 x 120s @ ISO800 with the optolong l-pro and canon 60d (still attached to the ED120, 0.85x reducer), but after flipping through them with blink in PI I threw out 25 or so straight away, something was up and the stars looked like dumbells. With the guiding not being quite so tight the stars are more bloated than I'd hoped for.
I had to do quite a bit more processing on this one too, but I've tried out doing it only to the luminance (extracted from the RGB in PI, then recombined). All noise reduction, deconvolution, sharpening, HDR, etc is done that way in this one.
There's also a lot of faint Ha in the background, so I figured since it's there I'll leave it in rather than trying to process it out. I'll have to come back to this one on a better night and get more data next time around.
Thanks - another one I was suprised by for a first night out with a new scope. The pink and blue came out nicely, and I think with more data or longer exposures (if I get the guiding better next time) should help to flatten out the background Ha, it's pretty noisy so far.
I'm keeping this one on top of my list to have another go at next time I get the chance.
