m42 not all forked up for once.

[DWHealing (Daryl)]

Taking some advice from the team here I decided to 'focus' on one target for a couple of nights. Having an 8" LX200 on a fork mount (no wedge) I didn't think it was worth the effort to spend too long on any one item - I was just having a great time actually finding M16 or for the first time ever the Horse Head just a few weeks ago (woohoo!). I like using the ASI Live stacking tool for instant gratification... but I decided to try a little harder and see how far I could go with imaging on a fork mount.

So I spent some time and sorted some darks, flats and biases. The look on my wife's face when taking photos of a brightly lit wall and stealing her white t-shirt to stick over my telescope - yes I am crazy.

Then finally thinking I should maybe use that ASI Air that I bought. I could never get guiding to work with PHD and the old LX200, she just kept going all over the place during the calibration phase. I was pleasantly surprised when the ASI Air slowly nudged the old fork mount slowly and start guiding. When I say guiding... Ha! it was not good by any means.. but it was a lot of fun.

I am amazed at how good the ZWO 2600 MPC - being on a fork mount and working at f10 - I am pretty much limited to 10 second images. Still the stars are a little bit not so round.

So... with 10 second images.... I'd better take a lot of images... So I managed to collect about 2000 of them. I ran all these through SIRIL and used GIMP to do some little adjustments. Its not perfect by any means but I think it looks pretty great.

I had so much fun! I suppose that is what it is all about.

[oska (John)]

Nice one Daryl, even for all your trials that came out great! As the song goes, I like big stack - I cannot lie

[Dave882 (David)]

Mate that’s come out great! Full of colour and detail and well tamed across the board. Well done!

[AstroViking (Steve)]

Excellent image, Daryl. Great colours and fantastic detail in the gas / dust clouds. Top work!

As you said - it's all about having enjoying what you're doing and getting a result you can be proud of.

Cheers,
V

[xelasnave]

You can be very pleased as you have nailed it.

Alex

[Kuz]

Beautiful image mate well done

[Stephane]

Excellent effort, really well done!

[Crater101 (Warren)]

Superb colour and well put together. Great image!

[LonelySpoon (Neville)]

That is a beautiful image Daryl,

Getting the Trapezium and the subtle bits together is not easy, well done.

Better than anything I've managed by far!

Neville
LSO

[DWHealing (Daryl)]

Thanks guys. Appreciate you having a look and the positive vibe everyone is sending!!

I attempted to repeat this with another 1200 images. This time I had to turn off guiding - that was just going all over the place.

Funny thing is I got rounder stars this time.... but less detail in the nebula.... I'm thinking I could join the 2 sets together and find a nice middle ground.... but I just need to attach a bit more storage space to process around 3000 (10 second subs) images... the auto OSC scripts in SIRIL tend to waste a bit of space when processing - I wonder if you can add in some delete steps when its finished using a sequence.. or I could just by another 1tb external drive...