[Dave882 (David)]

Hi folks - at the risk of duplicating other people's amazing efforts on the same target...this has actually been a project I've been working on for well over 12 months - probably spent 15-20 nights over this period just tinkering with different exposures, setups and processing techniques and after trying to walk the line between deep sky imaging and planetary lucky imaging, I realised that to get the best on this target it needed a full-on planetary approach...

So this week I've had 3 separate goes at the Homunculus, but it was last night that (after a terrible start due to heavy haze and currents from my urban jungle) the seeing settled down and suddenly we were in business.

The seeing was so good for a period of about an hour that I was actually refining my fine focus on the detail within the Homunculus lobes themselves (like what I do for planetary imaging). To keep the file size manageable it was a really tight ROI on the AVI. Here's the setup:

c14 at native focal length f11 (ASIAIR reporting 3985mm)
GSO craford focusser
asi462mc planetary camera
20ms AVI - 65,000 frames
ASICAP for capture
Stacked in AS!3 (best 75%)
Wavelet sharpening in Registax6 (only very slight sharpening required)
Additional boost to some levels and reduction of colour noise in Gimp / Light Room

Overall I'm really happy with how it's come out. I have a pic of a wider view that includes some of the flaring around the nebula itself taken with 30sec exposures and stacked in APP. My next task will be integrating these 2 together I think that will look nice if I can work it out.

Would appreciate comments/critique/suggestions. Thanks for looking