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Your images continue to impress with this setup Paul.
A little bit more of fine tuning your setup and it should be a reliable
imaging machine.
Elongation in one corner and not the others to me indicates sag/tilt.
Collimation would be all corners wouldn't it?
I got a touch of this myself on the weekend as I had to space out an adapter
that screwed in too deeply into my filter wheel causing some slight tilt.
Are you using all screw adapters?
Modern cameras plus filter wheels plus OAG plus adapters adds up to a lot of weight which is a strain even on an expensive Tak focuser.
So if there was any slop in the focuser to start with it will add to the problem.
You can always use a guide scope. I use an Astrotech 66ED scope and an SBIG ST402ME (nice camera but cheap fittings like the power connector which often is "touchy" and the autoguiding cable won't disengage from its socket oh for a FLI guiding camera!). It works fine although I only do 10mins with it.
As far as not being able to have the image brighter because of noise;
you clean up background noise by either:
1) light gaussian blur on the background only.
2) use a plug in like Noise Ninja which does a really nice job and hard to beat
3) Use a Noel Carboni action
You can even blur the noisy areas manually by using the blur tool and rubbing it on the offending areas. Works well with noisy rim areas of dim galaxy shots.
Just moving up the black point is another way but you lose most of your detail as a lot of faint stuff is towards the black end of the histogram.
When you image LRGB on this use either no filter or a clear filter for the luminance. No need for UV/IR coated luminance filter which reduces a small amount of transmission on this dim object.
Greg.
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