I finally got a chance to set everything up and leave it setup covered for Sunday and Monday night. Since I got all my setup and alignment out of the way Sunday I went for a more difficult target to try and get 3 hours before the moon got too high.
Everything went quite well for the first hour, before the condensation was just about dripping off the secondary.. I really need to get a dew heater or two (next project).
The first hour and a bit was ok, even with a little noticeable dew it just seemed to soften the image a bit, which probably isn't a bad thing. I'll keep them and add more later. The rest I had to discard (and everything else was working ok for once too).
This was also the first attempt with an OAG setup (at least the first that worked out), and guiding was somewhere between OK, and a little better than average (0.9 to 1.1 most of the sequence).
I processed using both a standard process with bias, darks and flats, and also took an extra set of longer exposure flats, and dark flats to match. I think the flats + dark flats with no bias may have been slightly better, but also think that pixinsight does a pretty excellent job of calibration either way. In the un-stretched stack with no other processing I could see a handful more stars with the dark flat calibration, but with an autostretch applied I couldn't tell the difference. Probably not really enough data, both were washed out and pretty faint.
It came out much darker red than I expected but I don't think there is enough data to make much of it yet. Instead of DBE I split the integrated image into RGB + L, linear fit, noise reduction on L, recombine with LRGB combination then auto-background extract with normalisation, I can't do any better (to my eye) with DBE + background neutralisation, plus I use photometric color calibration with neutralisation later anyway.
This one is
28 x 180s @-10c QHY10 OSC, optolong l-pro, Baader MPCC
50 darks, flats and another first 50 dark flats (no bias used this time).
Vixen 200mm F/4, ZWO OAG + 120MM mini
CGEM mount
I find the l-pro great for general purpose use, but I think this might be better with the enhance or extreme, I'll have to get one of those to test.
I think the really dark red is just the filter and not enough data, but other than that I don't mind the result for an hour or so of subs.
Thanks for all the comments, I've set aside the good subs to add more later, its currently sitting fairly high for me so with some luck I can get more data. It seems like there has been constant cloud for the last couple of months here in Melbourne.
I didn't realize it was flipped - I have trouble figuring out which was is meant to be up most of the time so haven't really started to work on framing or correct orientation. When I was looking at some stats from PI to see if the sensor had any tilt I couldn't quite figure out the orientation of the image to the sensor so in the end I just covered part of the camera and took some flats.
