[Eternal]

I thought having a modded camera and performing longer exposures would make processing easier. Boy was I wrong!!! After nearly three days of processing this image through Deepsky Stacker and Photoshop CS2 I've finally settled on the following version, which I'm sort of happy with.

My main problem was the over exposure of the centre which no matter what I tried, could not reduce in any way. Even the subs I took at a lower ISO level in anticipation of this problem made no difference as they too were over exposed in the centre.

What I ended up with is 30 x 2min ISO 1600 subs (24 selected) taken through a modded Canon 450D with Baader MPCC and Baader UHC-S filter with Nebulosity 2.0 (10 darks & bias frames, no flats because I forgot my light box).

The scope was an 8" Skywatcher Newtonian on a Skywatcher EQ6 with Synscan. Guiding was done through a Skywatcher ST80 with QHY5 autoguider PhD Guiding. Processing was done through DeepSky Stacker and Photoshop CS2.

Next time I'm going to try lots of 5 min subs at ISO 800 instead and combine them with lots of 1 min subs at ISO 400 to see if I can capture the core without burning it out.