After nearly 3 months of cloudy nights on the mid and south east coast of NSW , the 23rd January provided about 6 hours of clear skies to image but you guessed it, a near full moon was lighting up the sky.
As the ongoing forecast to at least late February early March was more cloudy nights , I decided to pick a big bright target like NGC 3372 and complete an imaging run in that small window of opportunity.
Clouds cleared around 10.30pm , locked on to the target and was imaging by 11.00pm
Finished my session at 4.30am after taking Flats ( total integration 3 hours )
Location : South Coast NSW
Skies : Bortle 3
Conditions : Average to Good Seeing
Full Moon
Very light wind ( 5 to 8 km/hr )
Thankfully no Dew
NexDome Obs
Telescope : 10" f5 Klaus Helmerich Carbon Fibre Newt
Mount : Skywatcher EQ8-R Pro
Imaging Camera : ZWO 2600MM temp -10C , Gain 100
Coma Corrector : TS Optics GPU
Filter Wheel : ZWO EFW 7 x 2"
Filters : Antlia 3nm Ha , Oiii and Sii
Guide Scope : Orion 60mm with helical focuser
Guide Camera : ZWO 290MM
ZWO EAF
22 x 3min subs Ha
20 x 3 min subs Oiii
22 x 3 min subs Sii
Darks from Library
Bias from Library
Flats Ha, Oiii , Sii
Tracking and Goto : Eqmod and Stellarium
Aquisition : APT
Guiding : PHD2 ( 0.45 to 0.55 arc sec total rms avg )
Analysed , Calibrated and Stacked in ASTAP
Processed in Startools V1.8 ( Data Sets loaded into Compose , Color SHO: HST preset with tweaks )
Also used Startools Spatially Variant PSF Deconvolution ( 12 samples , 8 iterations ) to improve the res
Quite happy with level of fine detail for only 3 hours of data and my focal length of 1280mm
Link to Astrobin below for full resolution…..
https://www.astrobin.com/lkrhma/
Thanks for Looking
Comments Welcome
Martin